







4 o 







"4 o 




•• <fr 



> 







* A 



r O **.-.%* A 

















V ^ o V 




***** ." 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



HOME FIRES IN FRANCE. $1.50 net. 

THE BENT TWIG. $1.50 net. 

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE. $1.50 net. 

HILLSBORO PEOPLE with occasional Ver- 
mont verses by Sarah N. Cleghorn. $1.50 
net. 

THE REAL MOTIVE. $1.50 net. 

UNDERSTOOD BETSY. $1.30 net. 

A MONTESSORI MOTHER. Illustrated. 

$1.35 net. 
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN. $1.35 net. 

(with Sarah N. Cleghorn) 
FELLOW CAPTAINS. $1.35 net. 



HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Publishers New York 



THE DAY OF GLORY 



BY 



DOROTHY CANFIELD 

5 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1919 



,-r 



tVf<< 



Copyright, rgig 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



m 2 1 i9 W 
©CU51529 7 








CONTENTS 




^ 


On the Edge ..... 


PAGE 

« • 3 




France's Fighting Woman Doctor 


•: M 39 




LOURDES >: 


. :. 8 9 




Some Confused Impressions . 


. . I05 




" It Is Rather for Us To Be Here 


Dedi- 




CATED " . .. ,.. 


• . 133 




The Day of Glory . . :# , ,., 


- > 139 



THE DAY OF GLORY 



/u 



ON THE EDGE 

As far as Jeanne's personal life was concerned, 
what little was left of it ebbed and flowed to the 
daily rhythm of the mail. She felt it begin to 
sink lower with the fatigue of preparing and 
serving the lunch for the six noisy children, 
always too hungry for the small portions, so 
that at the last she divided most of her own 
part among them. It ebbed lower and lower 
during the long hours of the afternoon when 
she strove desperately to keep the little ones 
cheerful and occupied and at the same time to 
mend and bake and darn and clean and iron and 
carry ashes out and coal in; her long slim pian- 
ist's fingers reddened and roughened till they bled, 
because cold cream was far too costly a luxury. 
It sank to its stagnant lowest during the tired 
end of the day when the younger children, fret- 
ful with too much indoors, disputed and quar- 
reled; and when, as she prepared the evening 
meal, she tried to help the older ones with their 

3 



4 THE DAY OF GLORY 

Latin declensions and Greek verbs so that they 
might be worthy sons of their father. And oh, 
the nights, the long nights, when she woke again 
and again, dreaming that she saw Andre 
wounded, dreaming that some one called to her 
in a loud voice that he had been killed at the 
head of his men. 

But after midnight she felt the turn of the 
tide. In less than twelve hours there might be 
a letter. She dozed, woke to make the round 
of the children's beds to be sure that they were 
covered, and noted that it was three o'clock. In 
seven hours she might have news again. She 
slept, and woke to hear the church clock clang 
out five, and knew that if she could but live 
through five hours more — 

In the morning, the countless minor agitations ; 
the early rising in the cold; the smoky kindling 
of the fire; the hurried expedition for the milk 
through the empty streets, dripping with the 
clammy fog of the region; the tumultuous awak- 
ening of the children, some noisily good-natured, 
some noisily bad-tempered; the preparation of 
the meager breakfast in the intervals of button- 



ON THE EDGE 5 

ing up blouses and smoothing tousled hair; then, 
as school time approached, the gradual crescendo 
of all the noise and confusion into the climax 
of the scampering departure of the three older 
ones, blue-nosed and shivering in their worn, 
insufficient wraps ; the gradual decrescendo as she 
dressed the thin, white bodies of the younger 
ones, and strove to invent some game for them 
which would keep them active and yet allow her 
to do the morning housework — all these tossing, 
restless waves were the merest surface agitation. 
Beneath their irregular, capricious rhythm she felt 
physically the steady, upward swelling of her ex- 
pectation as the clock-hands swung towards ten. 

Till then she knew nothing, nothing of what 
might have happened during the portentous night 
behind her, for every night, like every day, was 
portentous. There was no calamity which was 
impossible. The last four years had proved that. 
Anything might have happened since the last 
news had come in from the outer world — any- 
thing, that is, except the end of the war. That 
alone had come to seem impossible. 

And yet, in spite of that great flooding tide 



6 THE DAY OF GLORY 

of her expectancy, when the ring at the door 
finally came, it always gave Jeanne an instant's 
violent shock. Her heart flared up like a torch 
with hope and fear, its reflection flickering on 
her thin cheeks as she hurried to the front of 
the house and, her delicate work-worn hands 
shaking, opened the door on Fate. 

First her eye leaped to see that there was not 
the official-looking letter without a stamp which 
she had received so many times in her bad 
dreams, the letter from his captain announcing 
that sous-Lieutenant Bruneau — no, it had not 
come yet. She had another day's respite. 

She could breathe again, she could return the 
white-haired postman's " Bonjour, Madame Bru- 
neau." 

Next, even on the days when there was a let- 
ter from Andre, she tore open the Paris news- 
paper and read in one glance the last com- 
munique. After this her hands stopped shaking. 
No, there was no specially bad news. No hor- 
ror of a new offensive had begun. Then she 
could even smile faintly back at the tired old face 
before her and say, in answer to his inquiry, 



ON THE EDGE 7 

" Oh yes, all pretty well, thank you. My own 
are standing the winter pretty well. But my 
brother's children, they have never really re- 
covered from the nervous shock of that dread- 
ful experience of bombardment, when they lost 
their parents, you know. Of course none of the 
six are as plump or as rosy as I would like to 
have them — Michel is growing so fast." 

" You ought to thank God, Madame Bruneau, 
that they are too young. There are worse things 
than being thin and white." 

"Yes, yes, Monsieur Larcade," she apologized 
hastily for her unmerited good fortune compared 
to his, " what news from your sons ? " 

" Still no news from Salonique. A letter this 
morning from Jules's surgeon. They are not 
sure whether he will ever be able to walk again. 
The wound was so deep — an injury to the spine." 

A wordless gesture of sympathy from her, a 
weary shifting of his heavy letter bag, and he 
went on to the next door, behind which another 
woman waited, her hands shaking; and beyond 
that another one, and then another. 

If it was to be a good day, if there had been 



8 THE DAY OF GLORY 

a letter from Andre, she opened it hurriedly and 
read it all in one look, even though the children 
clung clamoring to her skirts, even though the 
fire smoked and threatened to go out. Then she 
set it carefully in the bosom of her dress and 
put on the faded caps and patched wraps and 
darned mittens to take the children out for their 
outing, while she did her marketing. They were 
too small to leave alone, even for half an hour. 

During the painful experience which her mar- 
keting always was, she felt warmed and sustained 
by the letter tucked inside her dress. Every- 
thing cost more than the month before, twice as 
much as the year before when her income was 
the same minute sum as now. 

But Andre was alive and unhurt. 

She looked longingly at the beefsteak which 
the older boys needed so much, her own chil- 
dren, and bought instead the small piece of coarse 
pork which must make a stew for them all, those 
other children of her blood whom the war had 
thrown on her hands. 

But she had a letter from her husband in her 
bosom. 



ON THE EDGE 9 

She priced the cauliflowers, sighed, and bought 
potatoes, and less of them than she had hoped 
to have, the price having gone up again. She 
was horrified to find that rice cost more than 
it had, an impossible sum per pound, even the 
broken, poor-quality grade. She would try mac- 
aroni as a substitute. There was no macaroni, 
the woman clerk informed her. There was none 
at all, at any price. Jeanne turned to another 
item on her list. The doctor had said that the 
children absolutely must have more fruit in their 
diet — fruit! Well, perhaps she might be able 
to manage prunes. They were the cheapest 
fruit — or they had been. " Prunes, Madame 
Bruneau? They are only for the rich." She 
named a price which made Jeanne gasp. 

She calculated the amount she would need for 
one portion each for her big family. It was out 
of the question. She was really aghast, and ap- 
pealed desperately to the woman clerk, " What 
do you do? " she asked. " We do without," an- 
swered the other woman briefly. 

"But your children? Growing children can't 
be in good health without some fruit." 



io THE DAY OF GLORY 

" They're not in good health," answered the 
other grimly. " My Marthe has eczema, and the 
doctor says that Henri is just ripe for tubercu- 
losis." Her voice died. 

Jeanne closed her eyes during the instant's 
silence which followed. The woman clerk 
shoved aimlessly at the sack of dry beans which 
stood between them. 

Then they both drew a long breath and be- 
gan to add up together the cost of Jeanne's pur- 
chases. She took out her pocketbook, paid so- 
berly, and went on to the baker's. 

Here a girl weighed out for her with scrupu- 
lous care the exact amount of bread allowed for 
the family, and took the bread tickets along with 
the money in return. At the sight and smell of 
the fresh-baked bread the children began their 
babbling, begging, clamorous demand which 
Jeanne dreaded almost more than anything else. 
She winced away from this daily pain, crying 
out, trying hastily to stop them before the tears 
came, " No, no, my darlings, you can't have any 
now. No, Jacqueline, don't tease auntie! An- 
nette dearie, you know if mother lets you have 



ON THE EDGE n 

any now there will be just that much less for you 
at lunch and dinner. You know I can't give you 
any of what belongs to the others." She was 
imploring them not to ask her for the food she 
could not give them. Anything but that! The 
daily repetition of this poignant little scene was 
intolerable. If she could only leave them at 
home, could only spare them that daily ordeal 
of the visit to the bakeshop where their poor lit- 
tle heads were turned at the sight and odor of 
all that food. Not to have bread to give them! 

She was almost on her knees before their 
shrill, insistent demands when she felt her hus- 
band's letter crackle against her breast, and 
stopped short. She was on the edge of losing 
her head, like men after too long shell fire when 
they walk dazedly straight into danger. She 
knew better than this ! The tragic manner would 
never do for little children who cannot live and 
thrive save in gaiety and lightness of heart. She 
was only making a bad matter worse. 

She summoned all her strength, put her hand 
on the letter in her bosom, and burst resolutely 
into a hearty laugh. ■' Oh, children, just see that 



12 THE DAY OF GLORY 

funny picture of the little kitten. He's chasing 
his tail, do you see, round and round and round. 
Annette, do you know how he feels! See, I'll 
hang this string down your back, and you try 
to catch it by turning around quickly. See, the 
faster you turn the faster it gets away from you. 
Maurice wants to try? Well, we'll just hurry 
home, and I will give you a piece of old red 
curtain cord and you each can have a tail and 
be a little kitten. And when the big ones get 
back from school you can show them how to 
chase tails. Won't they laugh? " 

They were safe in the street by this time, the 
bakeshop forgotten, the loaf in the basket hid- 
den, the children looking up, laughing through 
their tears at Jeanne, breathless, pouring all her 
vitality into her cheerful face and bright voice, 
so that there was not enough left to keep her 
knees from shaking under her. 

Back to the house quickly, lest the wretched 
war coal, half black stones, smoking sullenly in 
the cook-stove, should go out in their absence. 
The invention of the curtain-cord tails was still 
valid, even after the pork had been put on to 



ON THE EDGE 13 

cook with the potatoes. The children were still 
playing, still unexacting. Jeanne would have 
time to read her letter. 

She put the paper-thin potato parings to cook 
in an old kettle for their three hens, who occa- 
sionally presented them with a priceless fresh 
egg; and, wiping her cold, wet, potato-stained 
hands (was it possible that those hands had 
ever played Beethoven and Debussy?), took her 
treasure out of her bosom and unfolded the 
double sheet, warm still from the warmth of her 
body. 

This time she read it slowly, taking in, ab- 
sorbing to the last cell of her consciousness, every 
one of those words, written by candlelight, under- 
ground, to the thunder of shells exploding over 
the abri. They were plain, homely words enough, 
rambling, unstudied familiar phrases, such as hus- 
band and wife write to each other when they 
have shared their daily life for many years and 
still try to go on sharing what may be left to 
them of days in common. 

It had rained, as usual, all day long, but the 
new trench boots had kept his feet almost dry. 



i 4 THE DAY OF GLORY 

Yet he was ashamed of the price she must have 
paid for them — she, straining every nerve to buy- 
food to keep the children well. He was a man, 
a grown-up, and the war had done for them 
forever. Let him shift as best he could. Every- 
thing ought to go to the children, there would 
be little enough. But they must have the best 
chance we could give them. Whoever else was 
responsible for the war certainly the children 
had nothing to do with it. And they must be 
the torch bearers. Did she remember how he had 
always wondered why no musician had ever com- 
posed music on that theme? He could conceive 
such a noble symphonic poem called " The Torch 
Bearers." He had wondered all day if the coal 
had finally arrived at Meru. It went beyond his 
imagination how she could manage at all, the 
days when the coal supply was so low. In their 
little underground abri they had a stove — yes, a 
real stove. It had been left there by some Ameri- 
can ambulance men who had used the abri before 
them. So they were really warm, part of the 
time, and occasionally almost dry. But the wood 
they were burning — it made him sick. It was 



ON THE EDGE 15 

what his men tore out from the ruined village 
houses near which the trenches ran. Of course 
it could never be used for houses again, but when 
you know what it is to have a home of your own, 
and how it grows to be a part of you, it is not 
much fun to put parts of other people's houses 
into your stove. No, he did not need any new 
socks. He did not need anything; she need not 
go on trying to slip in some new luxury for him 
out of her impossibly small budget. Did she re- 
member that poor Dury, the youngest of his 
men? He had been shot yesterday; a stray ball, 
not meant for anybody in particular — such a silly 
way to be killed. And now there was the letter 
to write to his mother. Heavens, how he dreaded 
writing the letters to the parents of men who died 
or disappeared ! He hoped little Maurice's throat 
was better. What a sickly child that poor kid 
was! He was evidently one who would have to 
be nursed along all through his childhood, and 
since the war had killed his parents, it fell to 
his poor aunt to do the job. And then — " Now, 
see here, Jeanne darling, don't kill yourself over 
that little boy because you feel so guilty at not 



16 THE DAY OF GLORY 

loving him more. He's not a lovable kid. His 
own mother, poor nervous thing, never could keep 
from snapping at him, and you know your brother 
cared enough sight more for Jacqueline than for 
him. Don't you blame yourself. Take it easy! " 
Jeanne laid the letter down with a little ex- 
clamation, half a laugh. How ever did Andre 
know she did not love the little nephew who re- 
minded her so of the sister-in-law she had never 
been able to love ? She had not thought that any- 
body could guess that the child to whom she was 
always the gentlest was the one — and here was 
Andre, quite casually as usual, walking into her 
most secret places! How he knew her! How 
he knew the meaning of her smallest gesture, the 
turn of her most carefully worded phrase! How 
near he was to her! How there was no corner 
of her life where he did not come and go, at 
ease, and how she welcomed him in, how she 
rejoiced to feel him thus pervading the poor, 
hurried, barren inner life of her, which had 
bloomed so richly when they had lived it to- 
gether. How married they were! That was, 
after all, an achievement, to have wrested that 



ON THE EDGE 17 

glory from so horrible a thing as life had come 
to be. Let the heavens fall, she had known what 
it was to be one with a noble human soul. 

She stood up, her thin face glowing, her tired 
eyes shining, as they always were after reading 
Andre's letter. It was the only moment of the 
day when she felt herself wholly alive. 

This was the high tide of her daily life, poor, 
scanty trickle of life it was, even at its best, 
compared to the fathomless deep surge of the 
fullness of the days before the war, days when 
it had seemed natural that Andre should be there 
always, that they should profoundly live together, 
that there should be some leisure, and some music 
mixed with their work, and warm rooms and 
clothes and food as simply as there was air to 
breathe. 

A whiff of acrid coal smoke in her face, a 
wailing cry from Maurice who had pinched his 
finger, a warning half -hour stroke from the 
kitchen clock — she came back to the present with 
a start and strove loyally to use for that present 
the little renewal of strength which came from 
a momentary vision of the past. She changed 



1 8 THE DAY OF GLORY 

the drafts of the stove, stirred the stew and, gath- 
ering the weeping child up in her tired arms, 
began to make a funny nonsense song, purport- 
ing to be sung by the hurt finger. Her voice 
was obliged to pass through a knot in her throat, 
but it came out bravely, and in a moment the 
children were laughing again, their thin faces 
turned toward hers like little pale flowers toward 
the sun. 

Then there was the table to set, of course in 
the kitchen, since there was no coal for another 
fire in the cold house. How Jeanne suffered from 
this suffocating necessity to do everything in one 
small room ! It made an intolerable trial of every 
smallest process of the everyday life, to prepare 
food, and eat it, and play, and wash, and study, 
and bathe the children, and dress and undress 
them — they were like pigs in a sty, she often 
thought, working feverishly to keep a little order 
and decency in the room which seemed to her 
fastidious senses to reek stiflingly of the effluvia 
of too-concentrated human life. 

As she worked she felt, like an inward bleed- 
ing, the slow ebbing of her forces. The good 



ON THE EDGE 19 

moment of the day had come and gone. There 
was nothing to look forward to now till the mail 
of the next morning. 

And this was a good day, one of the best, 
when there had been no special activity on the 
front, when the daily letter from Andre arrived 
on time. But what of the days when the com- 
munique announced laconically, " Heavy artillery 
fire between Fresnes and Villers-Raignault " ? 
(Andre was stationed at Fresnes.) Or worse, 
when the great offensives began, when all personal 
letters from the front were stopped, when day 
after day the communique announced : " Violent 
fighting all along the Champagne front." 

The feeble, tired old postman, shuffling on his 
rounds, was a very snake-crowned horror to the 
dry-eyed women, waiting and hoping and dread- 
ing to see him come. Always there were cases 
of hysteria at such times; old Madame Viele, 
who shrieked out suddenly in the market-place 
that she had seen her son fall dead before her; 
Marguerite Lemaire, who, returning from Paris 
on the night train, had found her husband in the 
compartment with her, had kissed him, held his 



20 THE DAY OF GLORY 

hand, wept on his breast — and suddenly she was 
alone, with the train rushing on through the 
darkness to Meru, where she was met by the 
news of his death. 

At such times Jeanne braced her shivering limbs 
and throbbing nerves to steady rigidity and bore 
her burden as though she had the strength of 
eternity in her heart. Scraps of phrases from 
Andre's letters came before her eyes, as voices 
speak to tranced saints. As she worked she saw, 
written before her, " Whoever is responsible for 
the war, the children are not." Or again, " We 
are all evil creatures, God knows, and our mo- 
tives must be mixed in this war because they are 
mixed in everything else. But with whatever of 
virtue there is in me, I am righting for what I 
think best fit to survive in the world I wish my 
children to inhabit." Or again, for her own 
comfort, " Dearest darling Jeanne, the very 
powers of hell cannot take away from me the 
ten years of supreme happiness you have given 
me. 

The days went by, one, two, three, four, five, 
with no letters, with no words at all beyond the 



ON THE EDGE 21 

steady advance of the Germans. The nights went 
by, the long, long nights, not black and empty, but 
filled with dreadful lightning visions of what 
might be happening, even at that instant, as she 
lay in her bed. Jeanne felt no fatigue, no hun- 
ger, no consciousness of her body at all, at such 
times. It happened once, after one of these long, 
numb days, that she cut Ler hand deeply, and did 
not know she had done it till she saw the smears 
of blood on her skirt. Her first thought was 
that it was the only skirt she possessed and that 
she must not spoil it with her blood, because 
there was no money to buy another. 

It was that very evening, after she had tied 
up the wound on her hand and was beginning 
to undress the younger children, interrupting her- 
self frequently to help Jacques with his Latin, 
that she heard the front door of the house open 
and shut. 

She went as cold as ice. Her heart stopped 
beating, her hair stirred itself on her head. It 
had come. Some one had brought a telegram 
with the bad news. 

She put the children on one side, quietly, 



22 THE DAY OF GLORY 

opened the kitchen door, and stepped out into 
the cold twilight of the hall. 

Andre stood before her, a shadowy figure in 
the obscurity, pale, unshaven, muddy, smiling, a 
strange, dim, tired, infinitely tender smile. His 
arms were outstretched toward her. 

For a moment — a long, silent, intense moment 
of full life — she knew nothing but that he was 
there, that she held him in her arms, that his lips 
were on hers. Nothing else existed. There was 
no war, no danger, no fear, no wonder how he 
could have come. There was nothing in all her 
being but the consciousness that they were to- 
gether again. She was drowned deep in this 
consciousness; the blessed flood of it closed over 
her head. 

Presently the door of the kitchen opened, and 
the littler ones trooped out to find her. They 
could live but so few moments, those littler ones, 
without sucking at her vitality. 

She fell at once into the happy confusion of 
the usual leave of absence, crying out to the 
children, " See, see, papa has come ! See, Uncle 
Andre is here ! " 



ON THE EDGE 23 

It seemed to her the children were singularly 
apathetic, not instantly molten joy as she had 
been. The younger ones were even a little shy 
of him, who was, after all, an unknown man to 
them; and more than a little jealous of him, who 
came to share with them their maman., their 
auntie, the source and light and warmth of their 
exacting little, new lives. It seemed to Jeanne 
that they looked even more queerly at him this 
time than usual, and that there was in the side- 
long glances of the older ones an element of 
strangeness. Their father was becoming a mere 
legend to them, she thought with a painful con- 
traction of her heart. 

She found herself talking a great deal, in a 
quavering, excited voice, gone back to her old 
exuberance of expression. It seemed to her that 
she finally asked Andre how it could have hap- 
pened, his coming, and that he explained across 
the children's clamor that his regiment had gone 
down to the gates of hell in the offensive and 
that what was left of them had been given a 
twenty-four hours' leave of absence. 

Oh, yes, she understood with no further words, 



24 THE DAY OF GLORY 

she who knew by heart every way of communi- 
cation between his sector on the front and her 
door; he had reached Paris by the 3.20 train, 
had hurriedly changed stations, had caught the 
4.40 train out and reached Meru at twenty min- 
utes of seven. And oh, she had not been at the 
station to meet him! But of course he had not 
had time to telegraph. So, if it were only a 
twenty-four hour leave, he would need to take 
the midnight train back. He had come so far, 
so far, for five hours with her. 

She thought this all out while flying to get 
him some food, to open the can of meat, pre- 
ciously kept for just such a golden chance, to heat 
the potatoes which were left, to set Jacques to 
grinding some coffee, real coffee, such as they 
never used, to uncover the sacred little store of 
sugar, wide, to his hand ! And at the same time 
to talk to the children. How unresponsive chil- 
dren are, she thought; how quickly they outgrow 
whatever is not immediately present. It is hard 
to remember that four years, so long in the life 
of a child, is all eternity to a young child ; his ut- 
most imagination cannot compass it. She said all 



ON THE EDGE 25 

this to Andre, to explain the children. How ab- 
surd to try to explain them to Andre, smiling 
his deep understanding of them and of her, far 
deeper than she could ever fathom! 

Then she was driving them all upstairs to bed, 
leaving the kitchen to Andre, the big tin bath- 
tub and the clean underclothes which she had 
always ready for the first ceremony of every 
return from the trenches. If only there were 
more hot water! But she always let the fire 
go down toward night, to save coal. For her 
there was no need of fire. She could put a 
blanket around her shoulders and wrap her legs 
in a rug of an evening as she sat writing her 
letter to Andre by the poor light of the one lamp, 
filled with war kerosene, which smoked and glim- 
mered uncertainly. 

She hardly knew what she was doing as she 
hurried the children into their beds in the cold 
rooms. Hurry as she might, there were six of 
them ; and many, many, of the priceless, counted- 
out moments had passed before she ran down 
the stairs, as madly as any girl racing to meet 
her lover. 



26 THE DAY OF GLORY 

Andre was there, at table, washed, shaven, a 
little color in his lean, deeply lined cheeks under 
their warlike bronze. When he heard her step 
flying down the hall, he pushed back from the 
table and, his napkin across his knees, a good 
light of laughter in his eyes, he held out his arms 
to her again, crying like the traditional bride- 
groom, " Alone at last ! " 

So it began on the light note, that incredible 
good fortune of their evening together, she perch- 
ing on his knee, watching him eat, filling his 
plate, pouring out more coffee, talking, laugh- 
ing — yes, really laughing as she only did when 
Andre was there on permission. When he had 
finished she cleared the table, made up the fire, 
recklessly putting in lump after lump of the 
sticky resinous coal and opening all the drafts. 
They sat down together before the stove, beside 
the surly ill-conditioned lamp, and their tongues 
were loosened for much talk — light, deep, sad, 
hopeful, brave, depressed, casual, tragic. They 
poured out to each other all the thousand things 
which do not go into letters, even daily ones. 
She heard of the unreasonable irritability of his 



ON THE EDGE 27 

captain, and the plain, restoring good faith of 
the old colonel; the heroism of the men, the cow- 
ardly slinking back to a clerical position at the 
rear by young Montverdier, the son of their 
depute. He heard of her struggles with the boys' 
Latin and mathematics, and with the little ones' 
alphabet. " Just think, Andre, Annette, the ob- 
stinate little thing, will not admit that B's name 
is B. She says it is ' loof ' and she knows it is 
because she dreamed it was — haven't children the 
most absurd ideas ? " 

She spoke out with a Frenchwoman's frank- 
ness of her moments of horror, of despair, of 
doubt of the war's meaning, of revulsion from 
the industrial system which had made the war 
possible. There deep answered deep ; he brought 
to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills 
the trenches to the brim. - It is not glorious ; 
it is infamous. I am not a hero; I am a mur- 
derer. But there are worse things. It would be 
worse to have peace, with the German ideas ruling 
the world. No, every one of us would better 
die than allow that to happen. Yes, I have had 
too — who hasn't? — moments of doubt, moments 



28 THE DAY OF GLORY 

when the horror of our stupidity was too great, 
when I have thought that any other way would 
be better than war. But not since the Russian 
affair, not since the Germans marched into 
defenseless Russia. Russian children will be 
brought up in German schools to form a new 
generation of Germans. I would kill my chil- 
dren with my own hands before having them 
added to those ranks. No, since Russia, there 
seems no other way but to go on to the end, 
and to make that end an end to war forever." 
The worn phrases, dubious and tarnished on the 
facile tongues of public orators, repeated there 
in that dimly lighted room by that worn man 
and suffering woman, became new, became sac- 
ramental. 

They clung to each other for a moment again, 
and gradually felt the tension of the spirit melt 
away in the old cure of simple bodily nearness. 
His cheek against hers — at the sensation she be- 
came just a woman again. 

She stirred, she smiled; she told an amusing 
story of their queer old neighbor, — she inter- 
rupted herself to say reproachfully, " But 



ON THE EDGE 29 

I do love little Maurice! I don't love him 
as I love the other children, but just because 
of that I love him more, because I pity him 
so." 

" That," he said with conviction, " must be 
true because nobody but you would be capable of 
such mixed language and emotions." 

She had laughed at this and, remembering 
suddenly that she had a box of cigarettes for 
him, jumped up to get it. He was amazed. 
Where, in Heaven's name, had she been able to 
get cigarettes in France in 19 18? Ah, that was 
her little secret. She had her ways of doing 
things ! She teased him for an instant and then 
said she had begged it for him from an American 
Red Cross camion driver who had stopped there 
to get water for his radiator. The recollection 
brought to mind something painful, which she 
poured out before him like all the rest. " Oh 
but, Andre, what do you think the woman in 
uniform sitting by him said? Of course she 
couldn't have known that I understand English, 
but even so — She looked at me hard, and she 
said, ' These heroic Frenchwomen people make 



30 THE DAY OF GLORY 

so much fuss about, I notice you don't see any 
of them turning out to run cars or distribute 
clothes to refugees. Much they bother them- 
selves for France. They stay right inside their 
comfortable homes and do fancy work as usual/ 
Yes, she said that. Oh, Andre, it hurt! I was 
ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by any- 
thing but the war." 

This led to talk of America. " All our hope 
is with them, Jeanne. You mustn't mind what 
one woman said — very likely a tired woman too, 
fretted by being in a country where she doesn't 
speak the language. All the future is in their 
hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe 
they realize it! They are really coming, you 
know ; they are really here. I see them with my 
own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and engi- 
neers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fight- 
ing men. They are in the sector next to ours 
now. They fight. They fight with a sort of 
exuberance, as though it were a game they were 
playing and meant to win. And they all say 
that their country is back of them as France is 
back of us, to the last man, woman, and child. 



ON THE EDGE 31 

They're queer fellows. They remind me a little 
of our Normans and a little of our Gascons, if 
you can imagine the combination. Whenever 
there is a difficulty they have a whimsical, brag- 
ging little phrase, that they drawl out in their 
sharp, level voices, ' Never you mind, the Yanks 
are coming/ It made me smile at first, at their 
presumption, at their young ignorance. But 
there is something hypnotizing about the way 
they say that jerky, unlovely phrase, like the 
refrain of a popular song that sticks in your 
mind. It sticks in mine. ' The Yanks are com- 
ing ! ' The Russians have gone, or rather the 
Russians never were there, but * the Yanks are 
coming ! ' " 

Jeanne had been looking at him hard, scarcely 
hearing what he said, drawing in a new convic- 
tion from his eyes, his accent, the carriage of 
his head. " Why, Andre ! you are really hoping 
that it may end as it ought ! " she interrupted 
him suddenly, " You are really hoping — " He 
nodded soberly. " Yes, my darling, I really 
hope." 

He was silent, smiled, drew her to him with 



32 THE DAY OF GLORY 

a long breath, his arm strong and hard about 
her. They might have been eighteen and twenty 
again. " And I know," he whispered, " that you 
are the loveliest and the best and the bravest 
woman in the world." 

The tears ran down her cheeks at this — happy 
tears which he kissed away. When she could 
speak she protested, saying brokenly that she 
was weak, she was helpless in the face of the 
despair which so often overcame her, that she 
was perilously poised on the edge of hysteria. 
" Ah, who isn't near that edge ? " he told her. 
" Not to go over the edge, that is the most that 
can be done by even the strongest in these days." 
" No, no," she told him. " You don't know 
how weak I am, how cowardly, how I must 
struggle every day, every hour, not to give up 
altogether, to abandon the struggle and sink 
into the abyss with the children." " But you 
don't give it up," he murmured, his lips on her 
cheek. " You do go on with the struggle. I 
always find the children alive, well, happy. 
You weak! You cowardly! You are the 
bravest of the brave." 



ON THE EDGE 33 

The clock struck ten. 

They went upstairs hand in hand to look at 
the sleeping children and to try to plan some 
future for them. Jeanne told of her anxieties 
about Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose 
fits of brooding. "He's old enough to feel it 
all. The littler ones only suffer physically." 
Andre put his father's hand on the sleeping boy's 
forehead and looked down at him silently, the 
deep look of strength and comprehension which 
was like the wine of life to his wife. She 
thought it was a benediction to the boy which 
no priest could better. Andre took his watch 
out of his pocket and laid it on the table. " See 
here," he said, " I'm going to leave this here for 
Michel when he wakes in the morning. I only 
use the old wrist watch nowadays. It may 
please the little fellow to know I think him big 
enough to have my watch." 

" He'll make it a talisman — it's the very 
thing ! " she agreed, touched by his divining sym- 
pathy for the boy's nature. 

They roamed then through the cold deserted 
rooms of the much-loved little home, unused 



34 THE DAY OF GLORY 

because of lack of fuel, but the wan, clustering 
memories were too thick even for their tried and 
disciplined hearts. They went back into the 
smoky kitchen, shivering. 

The clock struck eleven. 

As it struck twelve, Jeanne turned back from 
the door, the lamp in her hand, the last echo of 
his footsteps faint in her ears. She stood for 
a moment, trance-like, staring at the yellow 
flame of the lamp, her eyes wide. Already it 
seemed impossible that he had been there. 

She felt horribly, horribly tired, hardly any 
other sensation but that. She went upstairs, un- 
'dressed rapidly, blew out the light, and lay down 
beside little Maurice. She slept with him, that 
she might be sure to watch over him carefully 
enough, fearing that she might not rise in the 
cold so readily for him as for the others. Almost 
at once she fell into a profound sleep. 

She woke with a start, to find herself standing 
up in her nightgown in the darkness, on the cold 
floor, in the middle of the room, the cold, damp 
wind blowing in on her from the black opening 



ON THE EDGE 35 

of the window. And at once she knew what 
had happened — knew it as though some one had 
just finished telling her. 

Andre had not been there at all that day. He 
had been killed, that was it, and her intense long- 
ing had brought his spirit straight to her for a 
moment, and all the rest she had imagined. 

Staring into the darkness, she saw it all with 
perfect lucidity. That was why he had looked 
so dim and shadowy when she had first seen him 
in the hall; that was why his smile had been so 
strange. That was why the children had seemed 
so queer; she understood now, it was because 
they saw no one there and because they heard 
her talking to herself. 

Did she, then, often talk to herself, that they 
should do no more than look sidelong and askance 
when she did it? Yes, she must have been 
slowly going near the edge of dementia during 
the last weeks, and quite over the edge into mad- 
ness the last five days of suspense. 

A deadly chill shook her, so that her teeth 
chattered loudly in the darkness, audible even to 
her ears. What did it matter? Andre had been 



36 THE DAY OF GLORY 

killed. There was no meaning in anything any 
more. 

The cold settled around her heart, an icy flood, 
and congealed in her veins. She felt herself to 
be dying and ran out to meet delivering death. 

She heard Andre's voice saying clearly, " Who- 
ever else is responsible for the war, the chil- 
dren are not. They must not suffer if we can 
help it" 

There was a pause when the world seemed to 
be slowly shifting under her feet. 

She knew what was coming. In an instant it 
came. In all that was left alive of her, she knew 
that she must try to go on living for the children. 

She turned her back on escape, and in a spirit- 
ual agony like the physical anguish of child- 
birth, she put out her hands to grope her way 
back to the fiery ordeal of life. 

Her hands, groping in the darkness, fell on 
something cold and metallic and round — Andre's 
watch, which he had left for Michel! 

But if his watch was there, he had been there 
himself. 



ON THE EDGE 37 

She ran trembling to the match box, struck a 
light, and looked. Yes, there was the watch, and 
a burned-out cigarette beside it. 

The match went out suddenly in the cold, damp 
breath from the window. 

Andre had come, then ! And she — she was in 
such a pass that she was incapable of believing 
that her husband had been with her for an hour. 
Stretched on the rack of long separation, her 
body and brain had lost the power to conceive 
of happiness as real. She felt now that she had 
not really believed in his presence any of the 
time. That was why she had fancied the chil- 
dren looked oddly at him. She had not been 
able to believe it! 

But she did now! It had reached her very 
self, at last, the knowledge that he had been 
there, that he had been of good cheer, that he 
loved her, that he thought the war might yet be 
won for the right, that he had even laughed, 
had said — what was that quaint phrase ? — " The 
Yanks are coming ! " 

She took the watch up in her hands, laid it 



38 THE DAY OF GLORY 

against her cheek, and began to cry, sweet, weak, 
childlike tears. 

She groped her way back to the bed, weeping 
silently, the watch clutched tightly in her hand. 

She lay down beside the unloved little orphan, 
whom she loved through pity; she took him in 
her arms; she felt the watch cold and hard and 
actual against her heart, and, the tears still on 
her cheeks, she fell once more asleep, smiling. 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN 
DOCTOR 

The American public has just heard of Dr. 
Nicole Girard-Mangin, the woman doctor who 
was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, 
and who proved herself so fearless and useful 
that she was kept there for two years amid 
bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She 
is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof 
that women can take men's parts, and do men's 
work, and know the man's joy of being useful. 
But she is much more than a woman doing a 
man's work. She is a human being of the highest 
type, giving to her country the highest sort of 
service, and remaining normal, sane, and well- 
balanced. 

Long before the tornado of the war burst over 
the world, Paris knew her in many varying 
phases which now, as we look back, we see to 
have been the unconscious preparation for the 
hour of crisis. Personally I knew of her, 
casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who 

39 



4 o THE DAY OF GLORY 

was attached to the Paris lyccc where my chil- 
dren go to school, and who was pushing the 
" fresh-air " movement for the city poor. People 
who met her in a social way knew her as an 
attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, 
lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one 
met once or twice a week at the theater or in 
the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed 
a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. Other 
people who saw her every morning in her labora- 
tory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her 
as one of those scientific investigators who can 
not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is 
unsolved. 

Those who saw her in the afternoon among 
the swarming sick and poor of the clinique of 
the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of 
those lovers of their kind who can not rest as 
long as the horrible apathy of public opinion 
about tuberculosis continues. People who inves- 
tigated cures for city ills and who went to visit 
the model tenement house for the very poor, near 
the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the 
originator and planner of that admirable enter- 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 41 
prise, whose energy and force fulness saw it 
financed and brought to practical existence. Ob- 
servers who knew her in the big international 
Feminist Conferences in European capitals, saw 
an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne, whose 
pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of 
the head under them. Friends knew her as the 
gently bred woman who, although driven by no 
material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, 
comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for 
an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered 
regularity of which alone kept it from breaking 
down her none too robust health. And those 
intimates who saw her in her home, saw her the 
most loved of sisters and daughters, the most 
devoted of mothers, adored by the little son to 
whom she has been father and mother ever since 
he was four years old. 

No one dreamed of war, but if the very day 
and hour had been known for years, Dr. Girard- 
Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more 
completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she 
had " trained " for it, as the runner trains for 
his race. She was not very strong, slightly built, 



42 THE DAY OF GLORY 

with some serious constitutional weakening, but 
she filled every day full to the brim with exact- 
ing and fatiguing work. She had two great fac- 
tors in her favor. One of them was that enviable 
gift which Nature gives occasionally to remark- 
able people, the capacity to live with very little 
sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a 
doctor — in whom close acquaintance with the 
laws of health seems often to breed contempt. 

Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor 
who believes profoundly, seriously, in the advice 
which she gives to others, in the importance of 
those simple, humdrum laws of daily health 
which only very extraordinary people have the 
strength of mind to obey. Never, never, she 
says, as though it were a matter of course, has 
she allowed fatigue, or overoccupation, or 
inertia, or boredom to interfere with her early 
morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, 
and her tonic cold bath. Never, never, no matter 
how long or exhausting the day, has she rolled 
into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the 
simple processes of the toilet, which make sleep 
so much more refreshing. No matter how ab- 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 43 

sorbed in her work, she has always taken the 
time at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably 
with quite ordinary people, to go to the theater, 
to hear music. She has always breakfasted and 
lunched with her little boy, has steered him 
through his spelling and arithmetic, has gone on 
walks with him, has been his comrade and " pal." 
This has been as good for her as for him, 
naturally. Every summer she has had the cou- 
rageous good sense to take a vacation in the 
country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to 
her own heart the advice about rational life 
which doctors so often reserve for their patients. 
To this woman, tempered to a steel-like 
strength by self-imposed discipline and by a 
regular, well-ordered life, came the great sum- 
mons. And it found her ready to the last nerve 
in her strong, delicate little hand. You have 
read, probably, how on that " Day of Doom " 
when France called out her men, a concierge 
received, among mobilization papers for all the 
men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr. 
Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the 
name) out to a military hospital in the Vosges 



44 THE DAY OF GLORY 

mountains. The notice of mobilization was 
handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long 
ago had heard the call to fight for France's best 
interests. She had seen her brother go before 
her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, 
into danger and service. She said a quick 
good-by to her friends, to her parents, to her 
son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, 
from whom she had never before been separated. 

Will every mother who reads these lines stop 
here and think what this means? 

There is no need to repeat in detail here what 
has already been told of the first three months of 
her service — her arrival at the field hospital, 
disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever- 
renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonish- 
ment of the doctor in charge. " What, a woman ! 
This is no place for a woman. But, good God ! 
if you know anything about surgery, roll up your 
sleeves and stay ! " 

There she stayed for three months, those blast- 
ing first three months of the war, when French 
people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet 
a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 45 

that distant military hospital, toiling incessantly 
in great heat, with insufficient supplies, bearing 
the mental and moral shock of the first encounter 
with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, 
highly organized woman, separated for the first 
time from her family, from her child, fearing 
everything for them and for her country, had 
no word, no tidings whatever, till the 28th of 
August. Then no knowledge of her son, of her 
parents, only a notice that the Government had 
retreated from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting 
news that, for the first! Next they knew that 
Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose 
wounds she dressed told her that he had been 
able to see the EiffeJ Tower from where he fell. 
This sounded as though the next news could be 
nothing but the German entry into Paris. 

All France throbbed with straining, despairing 
effort, far beyond its normal strength, during 
those first three months; and to do the man's 
part she took, the delicate woman doctor, labor- 
ing incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of 
human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull 
her through. 



46 THE DAY OF GLORY 

Then the wild period of fury and haste and 
nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and France 
faced another ordeal, harder for her tempera- 
ment even than the first fierce onset of the 
unequal struggle — the long period of patient en- 
durance of the unendurable. The miracle of the 
Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the 
sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger 
was past; the fatigue from the supernatural 
effort of those first months dimmed every eye, 
deadened all nerves. Then France tapped another 
reservoir of national strength and began pa- 
tiently, constructively to " organize " the war. 
And that daughter of France bent her energies 
to help in this need, as in the first. 

A rough rearrangement of competences was 
attempted everywhere on the front. Dentists no 
longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking 
instead of currying horses, and expert teleg- 
raphers stopped making ineffectual efforts to 
cook. It came out then that the real specialty 
of the valiant little woman doctor who had been 
doing such fine work in the operating-room was 
not surgery at all. " Fm no surgeon, you 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 47 

know ! " she says, and leaves it to her friends to 
tell you of the extraordinary record of her effi- 
ciency in that field, the low percentage of losses 
in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she 
says, " Ah, that's just because I'm not a born 
surgeon. I have to take very special care of my 
cases to be equal to the job." It was discovered 
that her great specialty was contagious diseases. 
There was great need for a specialist of that 
sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid epi- 
demic had broken out. This was before the 
extra precautions about inoculations, which were 
taken later. 

Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on 
November 1st, 19 14, and was there steadily for 
more than a year, until the 28th of February, 
191 6. She found her sick men on mattresses, in 
tents, on such low ground that they were often 
literally in water. Whenever there was freezing 
weather, those who cared for them slid about on 
sheets of ice. Above them, on higher ground, 
were some rough old barracks, empty, partly 
remodeled, said to have been left there by the 
Prussians in 1871. "Why don't we move the 



48 THE DAY OF GLORY 

sick up there?" she asked, and was met by all 
the usual dragging, clogging reasons given by 
administrative inertia. 

The sheds were not ready to occupy; there 
were no expert carpenters to get them ready; it 
would be impossible to heat them; no order for 
the change had come from Headquarters — fur- 
thermore, a reason not mentioned, the sheds, 
being on higher ground, were more exposed to 
shell-fire. Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some 
experience with administrative inertia in her 
struggles for better housing for the poor; and 
long before the war she had known what it was 
to put herself voluntarily in danger — the scar 
from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is 
the honorable proof of that. She knew that the 
sick men would be better off in the barracks on 
higher ground. So she took them there. Just 
like that. 

She was to have the entire care of the typhoid 
epidemic, and the only help which could be given 
her was to come from twenty men, absolutely 
unassorted — such a score as you would gather 
by walking down any street and picking up the 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 49 

first twenty men you met. There were several 
farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscel- 
laneous factory hands. The only person re- 
motely approaching a nurse was a man who had 
had the training for a pharmacist, but as he had 
never been able to stay sober long enough to 
take his examinations, you may not be sur- 
prised that he was the least useful of them 
all. 

These twenty casually selected human beings 
went unwillingly up the hill toward the barracks, 
ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human 
beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. 
But, although they did not know it, there 
marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like 
purpose, and an intelligence which was invin- 
cible. They took this to be but a smallish, 
youngish woman in uniform, and were all in 
great guffaws at the comic idea of being under 
her orders. 

Of course, to begin with, she did not know one 
of her men from another, but she studied them 
closely as they worked, driven along by her direc- 
tion, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping 



50 THE DAY OF GLORY 

the worst of the holes in the walls, arranging 
the poor apologies for mattresses, and cutting 
off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water — 
for our woman doctor was asked to take care of 
several hundred typhoid cases and was not pro- 
vided with so much as a bowl that would hold 
water. Presently, as they worked, she noticed 
that there were but nineteen men there. All day 
she studied their faces, their bearing, what was 
written on them for the seeing eye to read. At 
night, at supper-time, there were twenty men. 
Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle 
and pounced on a mild-looking poiln innocently 
taking his soup with the others. 

" Where have you been all day ? " she asked 
him. 

He fairly turned pale with astonishment, 
"Why, how did you — ? I've been right here, 
working! " he tried to bluster her down. 

" No, you haven't. You haven't been here 
since a quarter past ten this morning," she as- 
sured him. 

He hung his head a moment, then looked an 
ugly defiance. " Well, I've been in to Verdun to 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 51 

spend the day with a friend. What are you 
going to do about it?" 

" I'm going to have you punished for disobey- 
ing an officer/' she said promptly, though so 
kttle military had been her beneficent life, that 
she had no more idea than you or I or any other 
woman would have of what punishment could 
be given in such a case. 

" Officer's orders ! " said the man. " What 
©fiker?" All the men laughed. 

" I'm your officer," she said, and went away 
to telephone to the military authority in charge 
ef such cases. 

" I can't be expected to have discipline if I'm 
not backed up," she said. "This is a test case. 
It's now or never." 

The answer was a non-com and a guard 
marching up to the barracks, saluting the mili- 
tary doctor, and, with all due military ceremony, 
carrying off the offender for a week in prison. 
Dr. Girard-Mangin laughs still at the recollec- 
tion of the consternation among the nineteen 
who were left. " I never had any trouble about 
discipline, after that," she says. " Of course 



52 THE DAY OF GLORY 

there were the utter incompetents to be weeded 
out. For that I followed the time-honored army 
custom of sending my worst man whenever the 
demand from Headquarters came for a good, 
competent person to be sent to other work J 
Before long I had reduced the force of nurses 
to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the time 
of my service there, and we parted at the end 
old friends and tried comrades. I have never 
lost track of them since. They always write me 
once in a while, wherever they are." 

As soon as it grew dark enough, that first 
night, for the ambulances to dash out through 
the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the 
abris, close to the front, the stricken men began 
to come in. Before dawn, that very first night, 
there were fifty-five terrible typhoid cases 
brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that 
Dr. Girard-Mangin, working single-handed with 
her score of crude, untrained helpers, needed all 
her capacity for going without sleep. Then it 
was that her men, seeing her at work, stopped 
laughing because she was a woman and ad- 
mired her because she was a woman doing won- 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 53 

derful things; then, best of all, forgot that she 
was a woman, and took her simply for the 
matchless leader that she is, in the battle against 
disease. I think it was not wholly the guard, 
marching away the disobedient man to prison, who 
was responsible for the fact that our little woman 
doctor had no further difficulty with discipline. 

The condition of the typhoid patients was har- 
rowing beyond words. A man going out with 
his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken 
down with fever on arriving. It was impossible 
for him to return until his squad was relieved 
and he could be carried to the rear on a com- 
rade's back. There he was, there he must re- 
main, for the three or four or five days of his 
squad's " turn " in the front lines. Can you 
imagine the condition of a man with typhoid 
fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for 
four days, with no shelter from the rain or 
snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no 
care beyond an occasional drink of water from 
a comrade's flask? For your own sake I hope 
you can not imagine it. And I will not go into 
details. Enough to say that such men were 



54 THE DAY OF GLORY 

brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the 
fifties, filthy beyond words, at the limit of ex- 
haustion, out of their heads with weakness and 
fever and horror. 

And there to stem that black tide of human 
misery stands this little upright, active, valiant, 
twentieth-century woman. I think, although we 
are not of her nation, we may well be proud of 
her as a fellow-being who had voluntarily re- 
nounced ease to choose the life which had made 
her fit to cope with the crisis of that night — and 
of the more than four hundred days and nights 
following. For cope with it she did, competently, 
resolutely, successfully. " Oh yes, we gave them 
cold baths," she says, when you ask for 
details. " We managed somehow. They had ail 
the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injec- 
tions, the right food — everything very primitive 
at first, of course, but everything you ever do 
for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses 
was very low always." 

" But how ? How? How did you manage ? " 
you ask. 

" Oh, at the beginning everything was very 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 55 
rough. We had only one portable galvanized- 
iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly in- 
fected, there was less danger in bathing them all 
in the same tub than in not fighting the fever 
that way. And then, just as soon as I could 
reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for 
naore, and they were sent. ,, 

" But how could you, single-handed, give cold 
baths to so many men? It's a difficult matter, 
giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient." 

" I wasn't single-handed. I had my twelve 
soldier-nurses." 

" * Nurses, 3 you say ! Farm-laborers, account- 
ants, barbers, drunken druggists ! " 

" But I got rid of that good-for-nothing 
pharmacist at once ! And the others— the twelve 
good ones — they learned what to do. They 
learned how to give the simple remedies. They 
learned how to do the other things enough to 
give me a report — how to take temperatures, how 
to give the baths at the right degree for the right 
time, how to take the pulse." 

"How could they learn all that?" you ask, 
amazed. 



56 THE DAY OF GLORY 

" I taught them," says Dr. Girard-Mangin, 
slightly surprised, in the simplest, most matter- 
of-fact tone. 

You look past her, out there to that hand-to- 
hand struggle with death which was carried on 
by the one indomitable will and the one well- 
trained mind, strong enough not only to animate 
this woman's body before you, but those other 
bodies and ignorant, indocile minds. 

" They did it very well, too," she assures you, 
and you do not doubt her. 

That woman could teach anybody to do any- 
thing. 

You come back to details. " But how could 
you get enough water and heat it for so many 
baths, on just those rough, small, heating- 
stoves? " 

" Well, we were at it all the time, practically, 
day and night. We cut the tops off those big 
gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood 
one on every stove up and down the barracks. 
There wasn't a moment when water wasn't being 
heated, or used, or carried away." 

"What could you do about intestinal hemor- 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 57 

rhages ? " you ask. " You must have had many, 
with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand 
nurses couldn't " 

" I never tried to teach them how to handle 
any real crisis, only to recognize it when it came, 
and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them to 
watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on 
their patients' clothing or on the mattress, to take 
the knapsack out from under the sick man's 
head — they had no other pillow, of course — to 
lay him down flat, and then to run and call me, 
from wherever I was." 

" You must have had almost no sleep at all." 

" That was the greatest help I had, being able 
to get along on little sleep. And I got more 
work out of my helpers than any man could, for 
they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing 
that a woman, half their size, could still keep 
going." 

" But how about your famous hygienic regu- 
larity, the morning exercises and cold baths 
and " 

" Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long 
period of regular service, I took the greatest 



58 THE DAY OF GLORY 

care to go on with all the things which keep one 

fit for regular service." 

" Morning tubs ? " 

"Yes, morning tubs! I slept — what time I 
had to sleep — in an abandoned peasant's house 
in an evacuated village near the hospital. I 
didn't take any of the downstairs rooms because 
people are likely to walk right into an abandoned 
house, and part of the time there were soldiers 
quartered in the village. Then there was usually 
somebody in the house with me. The other 
times I had it all to myself. I took a room on 
the second floor. It happened to have a flight 
of steps leading up to it, and another one going 
out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had 
any heat, and the drafts from those two open 
stairways — well, it was like sleeping in the mid- 
dle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take 
down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed 
was so cold that it was almost instantly chilled. 
Many a time I have gone to sleep, all curled up 
in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because 
they were so cold, and wakened to find them still 
as icy. Oh, the cold! That is the worst enemy 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 59 

of all at the front, the most wearing, the most 
demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it 
lasts so. With other things — hunger, wounds, 
danger — either it kills you, or it passes. But 
the cold is always there." 

She loses herself for a moment in brooding 
recollection and you wonder if Jeanne d'Arc 
ever did anything braver for her country than 
did this delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, 
sleeping alone for months and months in bitter 
cold in a deserted house in a deserted village. 

She comes back to the present. " And it was 
there that I took my morning tubs ! " she says 
with an amused smile. "Of course the water 
froze hard into a solid lump. So I put carbonate 
dc potasse into it. This not only kept it from 
freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an 
excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I 
assure you, after a night in which I had been 
incessantly called from one bed to another, when 
I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath 
in that water was like a resurrection. I was 
made over. Then, of course, no matter how busy 
I was, I took care of my feet — changed my 



60 THE DAY OF GLORY 

stockings and shoes every day. Feet are one's 
weakest point in a long pull like that." 

You venture to remark about a slight limp 
noticeable when she walks. " Yes, it comes from 
a frozen foot — I have to admit it. But it's really 
not my fault. That was later, at the time of the 
battle at Verdun. There are always brief crises, 
when you have to give your all and not stop to 
think. I went nine days then without once 
taking off my shoes. I hadn't my other 
pair by that time. The Bodies had them, 
probably." 

But we have not come to that terrific epic, as 
yet. Before that second tornado burst over the 
heads of the French and of our woman doctor, 
there was a long, hard, dull period of four hun- 
dred and seventy days of continuous service — 
for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, 
felt in honor bound to do more than a man would 
do. In the three years and more of her war 
service, she has had just three weeks' furlough, 
seven days out of every year to see her son, to 
see her family, to relax. Every other day of 
that long procession of days, she has been on 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 61 

duty, active, and, as befits a woman, construc- 
tively active. 

She did not continue resignedly to struggle 
with tin-can drinking-cups, and one bathtub for 
two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the 
proverbially slow mills of the Government to 
grind her out the necessary supplies. She was 
not only the army doctor in charge of the con- 
tagious cases in the big sanitary section and 
hospital near Verdun, she was also a figure of 
international importance, the Presidente of the 
Hygiene Department of the Conseil International 
des Femmes — her predecessor had been Lady 
Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the big 
Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known 
to the charitable world in the Society for Hy- 
gienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed so 
much to her ; and she had a wide circle of friends 
everywhere. The little aide major sent out from 
her bare shed-hospital, lacking in everything, a 
clarion call for help for her sick men. With 
years of experience in organization back of her, 
she set to work and, in the midst of the fury of 
destruction all about her, built up, item by item, 



62 THE DAY OF GLORY 

a little corner of order and competent activity. 
In November, 19 14, there was nothing but a 
windswept shed, with straw pallets and tin-can 
utensils. By June of the next year you would 
have found, if you had had the courage to go 
within two kilometers of the front line, a very 
well-appointed contagious ward of a military hos- 
pital, where nothing was lacking for the men's 
comfort — except a certainty that the whole thing 
might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And 
by the end of 19 15, when there began to be talk 
of a great German drive against Verdun, the 
men under our doctor's supervision had as good 
care as they could have had anywhere, with 
laboratory and sterilizing facilities — everything. 
Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to 
be had in hospitals and she did not rest until 
somehow, Aladdin-like, she had made it to blos- 
som, out there in danger and desolation. 

All during January of 19 16 there was terrific 
tension along that front. The monster German 
offensive against Verdun was in the air. The 
month of January passed with desperate slow- 
ness, such intent, apprehensive suspense being 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 63 

torturing for human nerves, especially tired hu- 
man nerves which had already been through a 
long, severe period of trial. 

Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our 
little doctor stuck faithfully to her bedrock prin- 
ciples of health, changed her shoes and stock- 
ings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub- 
downs in her colder-than-freezing water, went 
through her deep-breathing and her setting-up 
exercises every morning. By such merely 
feminine reliance on everyday sanity in life, she 
kept herself in excellent physical shape, and did 
not succumb to the temptation, which is too 
much for so many doctors under strain, of hypo- 
dermics of strychnin, and other stimulants. 

February 1st came. The great storm, looming 
murkily, had not burst. 

February inched itself along, and finally, be- 
cause human nature can only stand about so 
much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter 
fatigue. 

On February 21st, which was a Monday, it 
was fairly clear, cold, with what passes for 
sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin 



64 THE DAY OF GLORY 

stepped out in front of her shed-hospital ward, 
after lunch, and made this remark to herself: 
" I don't believe the Boches are going to pull 
off that offensive at all. And to-day is almost 
sunny. I have a good notion to go over to the 
165th and get my hair washed/' There was an 
ex-coiffeur in that regiment who kept on with 
his trade in his leisure moments. 

As this singularly peace-time thought passed 
through her mind, an obits screamed its way 
loudly over her head. " That's near," she 
thought, " nearer than they generally are." 

Before she could get back into the hospital, 
the battle of Verdun had begun. 

The blow was delivered with astounding ra- 
pidity, and with stunning force. Up to that 
time, nothing had ever been conceived like the 
violence of the artillery fire. There in the hos- 
pital, only two kilometers back of the front, the 
noise was so great they could scarcely hear each 
other's voices. Upon those men, and that 
woman, unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking 
suspense, the great crisis leaped with murderous 
fury. It was as though the world were being 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 65 
battered to pieces about their heads. Each one 
called up in himself all the reserve strength his 
life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as 
best he could to self-control. 

The first nerves to give way were in the bake- 
shop. The bakers suddenly burst out of their 
overheated cell and, half -naked in that sharp 
cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and 
trousers, fled away, anywhere, away, out of that 
hell. One of the doctors, seeing this beginning 
of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt 
to stem the tide of fear, " Shame on you, men! 
What are you doing! What would happen if 
every one ran away ! " 

One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility 
the outstretched restraining arms, called out 
heartily, with a strong Southern accent, " Right 
you are, doctor, perfectly right! " and continued 
to run faster than ever. Which typically Midi 
phrase and action was seized upon by those gal- 
lant French hearts for the laugh which is the 
Gallic coquetry in the face of danger. 

But even they could not smile at what they 
next saw. At four o'clock that afternoon began 



66 THE DAY OF GLORY 

the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments 
of chasseurs fleeing toward the rear. 

" So inconceivable was this to me, that I re- 
peated, ' Chasseurs! Retreating! ' " 

Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment 
as if she saw them again. " Oh, yes, retreating 
— and no wonder ! All their equipment gone, no 
guns, no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets 
— their bare fists, and those bleeding, for weap- 
ons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally 
naked, except for their leather cartridge belts. 
Everything made of cloth had been blown from 
their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding 
shells. Many of them were horribly wounded, 
although they were staggering along. I remem- 
ber one man, whose wounds we dressed, who 
came reeling up to the hospital, holding his hand 
to his face, and when he took his hand down most 
of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were 
retreating, those who had enough life left to 
walk. And they told us that Verdun was 
lost, that no human power could resist that 
thrust." 

All that night, and all the next day and all 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 67 

the next night, such men poured through and 
past the hospital and during all that time there 
was no cessation in the intolerable, maddening 
din of the artillery. When you ask Dr. Girard- 
Mangin how she lived through those days and 
nights, she tells you steadily, " Oh, that was not 
the worst. We could still work. And we did. 
More than eighteen thousand wounded passed 
through the hospital that week. We had too 
much to do to think of anything else. It seemed 
as though all the men in the world were wounded 
and pouring in on us." 

On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men 
changed in character somewhat, and this meant 
that the end was near. In place of chasseurs 
and the ordinary poilus, quantities of brown 
Moroccans, those who fight at the very front, 
came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of 
them, yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at 
themselves like children and howling like wild 
beasts — impossible to understand or to make 
understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital 
staff, staggering with fatigue themselves, min- 
istered to them, too, until — this was where they 



68 THE DAY OF GLORY 

all touched bottom — until, on Wednesday night, 
the electricity suddenly gave out and, in the 
twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on the great 
wards, shaken by the incessant infernal scream- 
ing rush of the shells overhead, by the thunder 
of the cannon, and filled with the shrieks of the 
agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness 
like the end of the world. 

Messengers were sent hastily to grope their 
way down to the nearest village for candles. 
But they returned empty-handed. Long before 
that the soldiers had carried off all the supply 
of candles. 

" What did you do, all that night? " 

Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of 
belittling the experience. 

" It was awful beyond anything imaginable," 
she tells you gravely. "The worst thing that 
can happen to a doctor had come — to be in the 
midst of suffering and not to be able to lift a 
finger to help. All that we could do was to give 
them water to drink. We could feel our way to 
the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we 
could only sit, helpless, listen to the shells and 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 69 

I 
to the wounded men groaning, and wait for 

dawn." 

Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, 
like you, like me, who lived through those days 
and those nights, and came through them morally 
and physically intact, into an even greater use- 
fulness. It will not be a bad thing to remember 
her the next time we feel " tired " in our 
ordinary round of small efforts. 

On the next day came the order to evacuate 
the hospital, bitter proof of the German success. 
Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick 
men in relays of four in the only ambulance at 
her disposal. They were taken down to the 
nearest little branch railroad, there put on the 
train, and sent — nobody knew where, anywhere 
out of the range of German guns. 

All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By 
Thursday evening there were left only nine men 
in her ward, men practically dying, far gone 
with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. 
Dr. Girard-Mangin spent another black night 
beside her dying men, moving from one to 
another in the intense obscurity, raising her voice 



70 THE DAY OF GLORY 

above the thunder of the artillery to comfort 
them, to give them what small help she could 
without a light. On Friday all the hospital 
staff, with a few exceptions, was to leave. The 
hospital buildings and equipment were to be left 
in the charge of a non-com and two privates; 
and the men too ill to transport were to be left 
with one doctor and two aides. The rule in the 
French Sanitary Service for that case is that 
the youngest doctor stays with the sick. Dr. 
Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor. 

But at this, the good head-doctor, who had 
daughters of his own in Paris, cried out that 
there was a limit, that he would never for- 
give any man who left a daughter of his 
alone in such a position, alone with dying men, 
alone under fire, alone to face the Bodies. 
No, no Frenchman could be expected to do 
that. 

Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to 
the military authority in command, for permis- 
sion to do her duty as it fell to her. " I have 
not failed in my services so far. It is not just 
to force me to fail now." 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 71 

The military ruling was that the usual rule 
would hold. The little woman doctor stayed in 
danger, and the men went back to the rear. The 
parting was a moving one; those comrades of 
hers who had seen her working by their sides 
for so many months took her in their arms and 
wept openly as they bade her good-by. 

If you venture to ask her what were her own 
emotions at this moment, she tells you with a 
shudder, " Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for 
France. We all thought, you know,, that Verdun 
had fallen, that the Germans had pierced the line. 
No one knew how far they had gone. It was 
an awful moment. ,, Apparently she did not 
think of herself at all. 

All day Friday, she was there with her 
stricken men and with two aides. Friday night 
she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday 
the man left in charge of the hospital buildings 
went mad from the nervous tension — they ex- 
pected almost from hour to hour to see the Ger- 
mans appear — and from the hellish noise of the 
artillery. 

I find myself cold as I try to think what 



72 THE DAY OF GLORY 

another black night meant in those conditions. 
Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into 
another dawn. 

On Sunday morning the General in command 
of that region, amazed to find that any one was 
still there, sent peremptory orders that the 
premises must be evacuated entirely, dying men 
and all. They would certainly be killed if they 
were kept there. And more, there was no 
longer anything to give them to eat. This was 
a military order and so overrode the rulings of 
the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin pre- 
pared to evacuate. She had at her disposition a 
small camion in which she put the four men best 
able to be carried, and her own ambulance in 
which she packed the five worst cases, crosswise 
of the vehicle. To try to give them some security 
against the inevitable jolting, she bound them 
tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, 
with her little medicine-kit, she got in beside 
them and told her chauffeur to take them to 
Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route 
taken by the ravitaillement convoys, because her 
sick men could never live through the length of 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 73 

that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along 
directly back of the front. 

" I wonder that he was willing to take that 
dangerous route," you say. 

" I didn't ask his opinion about it," says Dr. 
Girard-Mangin with a ring of iron in her voice. 

So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, 
constantly under fire, with five men at the point 
of death. The chauffeur dodged between the 
bursting shells, the woman in the car watched 
her sick men closely and kept them up with hypo- 
dermics of stimulants — which are not admin- 
istered by a shaking hand ! 

You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar 
on her cheek, " It was then, during that ride, 
that you were wounded, wasn't it ? " 

She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, 
" And when we finally reached Clermont-en- 
Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I 
found the hospital absolutely swamped witH 
wounded. I said I was there with five mortally 
sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ' If 
they were all Generals we could not take them 
in. You are mad, Madame, to bring sick men 



74 THE DAY OF GLORY 

here/ So we went on ten kilometers further to 
a little village called Froidos, where my face- 
wound was dressed and where finally I was able 
to leave my men, all alive still, in good hands. " 

" They didn't live to get well, did they? " you 
ask. 

At this question, she has a moment of stupe- 
faction before the picture of your total incom- 
prehension of what she has been talking about; 
she has a moment's retrospective stare back into 
that seething caldron which was the battle of 
Verdun ; she opens her mouth to cry out on your 
lack of imagination; and she ends by saying 
quietly, almost with pity for your ignorance, 
" Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. 
There was a great deal too much else to be done 
at that time." 

Have you lost track of time and place in that 
adventure of hers? It is not surprising. She 
was then in the little village of Froidos, on the 
afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost 
exactly a week after the battle began — and after 
almost exactly a week of unbelievable horror — 
after four nights spent without a light in a great 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 75 

hospital full of wounded men — after a ride of 
nearly fifty kilometers constantly under fire, with 
mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a 
good soldier who has accomplished the task set 
him, to report at headquarters for another. 

Her headquarters, the Direction du Service 
Sanitaire was at Bar-le-Duc. Without a mo- 
ment's rest or delay, she set out for Bar-le-Duc, 
she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of 
sleep. They arrived there at midnight. She 
reported herself at the hospital, so large that in 
normal times it holds three thousand wounded. 
" I have just brought in the last of the sick from 
the military hospital at Verdun/' she said, to 
explain her presence. They were astounded to 
hear that any one had been there so lately. 
Every one had thought that certainly the Ger- 
mans were there by that time. 

" Please, is there a place where I may sleep a 
few hours? " she said. 

But there was no place, not one. The great 
hospital was crowded to the last inch of its 
space with wounded — halls, passageways, aisles, 
even the stairs had wounded on them. Finally 



76 THE DAY OF GLORY 

some one gave her a blanket and she lay down 
on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor 
and slept till morning — five or six hours. Then 
she went out into the town to try to find a lodg- 
ing. Not one to be had, the town being as full 
as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes 
off, naturally, nor her shoes. 

" Oh, then I did feel tired/' she says. " That 
morning, for the first time, I knew how tired I 
was, as I went dragging myself from door to 
door, begging for a room and a bed. It was 
because I was no longer working, you see. As 
long as you have work to do, you can go on." 

At last a poor woman took pity on her, said 
that she and her daughter would sleep together 
on one narrow bed, and let her have the other 
one. 

" I was so glad, so glad," says Dr. Girard- 
Mangin, " to know I was to have a real bed ! I 
was like a child. When you are as tired as that, 
you don't think of anything but the simple ele- 
mentals — lying down, being warm, having some- 
thing to eat — all your fine, civilized ideas are 
swept away." 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 77 

She went back toward the hospital to get what 
few things she had been able to bring with her, 
and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper 
toward her. " We are to be off at once," he said, 
and showed her an order to leave Bar-le-Duc 
without delay, taking two nurses with them, and 
to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelain- 
court. They were crowded with wounded there. 

" Then, at once, my tiredness went away," she 
says. " It only lasted while I thought of getting 
a bed. When I knew we were going into action 
once more, I was myself again." 

By two o'clock that afternoon — this was Mon- 
day — they were en route for the hospital, the 
doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two 
nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, 
weeping inside. 

" What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that 
was ! " she exclaims, and almost for the only 
time during her quietly told narration her voice 
quivers, her eyes suffuse. " We were going 
against the tide of fresh reserves, rushing out to 
the front — mile after mile, facing those strongly 
marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, 



78 THE DAY OF GLORY 

all going out to suffer the unimaginable horrors 
from which I had just come. I could not bear 
to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so 
proud of them, so yearning over them! And 
they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward to 
the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us 
again and again, ' The battle isn't over yet, is 
it ? Will we get there in time ? ' They laughed 
light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they 
saw me and called out, ' Oh, the women are fight- 
ing out there, too, are they? ' Wave after wave 
of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, 
marching out to death.' , 

They were delayed by an accident to a tire, 
being instantly — as is the rule on military roads, 
always crammed to the last inch — lifted bodily 
into a neighboring field for repairs. No sta- 
tioning for repairs is allowed on a road where 
every one is incessantly in movement. While 
the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper 
and deeper into the mud, and it was a Herculean 
undertaking to get it back in the main thorough- 
fare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured poilus 
managed this, heaving together with the hearty 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 79 

good-will to which all drivers of American am- 
bulances can testify. 

Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when 
they drew near their destination. The chauffeur 
turned off the main road into a smaller one, a 
short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in 
mud up to his hubs. From twelve o'clock that 
night till half -past five in the morning, they 
labored to make the few kilometers which 
separated them from Vadelaincourt. Once the 
chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush of water 
against the car, announced that he was sure that 
the river had burst its banks, that they had 
missed the bridge and were now in the main cur- 
rent. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investi- 
gate and found herself knee-deep in mud so 
liquid that its sound had deceived the chauffeur. 
They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wring- 
ing their hands. 

By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived 
at the hospital, where the hard-worked head- 
doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, 
cried out upon her for being a woman, but told 
her for Heaven's sake to stay and help. The 



80 THE DAY OF GLORY 

nurses were taken in and set to work, where at 
once they forgot themselves and their fears. 
But again there was no place for the new doctor 
to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with 
human wreckage. She did what all ambulance 
people hate to do, she went back to the reeking 
ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots 
and all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked 
blankets of her ex-patients, and instantly fell 
asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place 
of sleeping under the car, on another stretcher. 

She had no more than closed her eyes, when 
came a loud, imperious pounding on the car, 
" Get up quickly. The medecin-en-chef sends for 
you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought 
in; every hand needed.' ' 

She went back through the mud to the hospital, 
had a cup of hot coffee and — detail eloquent of 
the confusion and disorganization of that fever- 
ish week — some plum-cake! By what freak of 
ravitaillement there was only plum-cake, she 
never knew. 

Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. 
She went into the operating-room at half -past 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 81 

seven in the morning. She operated steadily, 
without stopping, for more than five hours. At 
one o'clock she felt giddy and her legs failed her. 
She sat down flat on the floor, leaning back 
against the wall. " Here it comes ! " she said to 
herself, fighting the faintness which dissolved all 
her members, " Here comes womanishness ! " 

But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her 
teeth and tightening her will until she conquered 
it. A new relay of doctors came in. She stag- 
gered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate 
and another piece of plum-cake! And was told 
that she would be "off duty" till eight that 
evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. 
Snow lay on the fields, mud was deep in the 
roads. There was not a bed empty. 

" I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a 
comfortable chair," she tells you, " and took 
down my hair and brushed and braided it. You 
know how much that rests you ! " 

Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in 
the world over whom to sentimentalize, and I 
swore before beginning to write about her that 
I would try not to do it. But I can not restrain 



82 THE DAY OF GLORY 

myself from asking you here if you do not feel 
with me like both laughing and crying at the 
inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar 
gesture, at the picture of that shining little war- 
rior-figure, returning in that abomination of 
desolation to the simple action of a sheltered 
woman's everyday home life? 

Then she went to sleep, there in the " quite 
comfortable " chair, with her shoes unlaced but 
still on her feet. " I had lost my other pair 
somewhere along the route," she explains, " and 
I didn't dare to take those off because I knew I 
could never get them on again if I did." 

There followed twenty days of this terrific 
routine, steady work in the operating-room with 
intervals of seven hours' " rest," with nowhere 
to go to rest. " But the food got better almost 
at once," she says, in explanation of her having 
lived through it. "We couldn't have gotten 
along on plum-cake, of course ! " 

For nine of those twenty days, she never took 
off her shoes at all, and the foot was frozen 
there which now she drags a little in walking. 

On March 23rd, a month after the battle of 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 83 

Verdun had begun, the medecin-chef-inspecteur 
came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual 
motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor 
there, decided — rather late — that it was no place 
for a woman, and sent her to Chalons. For six 
months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near 
Ypres, working specially among the tubercular 
soldiers, but also taking her full share of mili- 
tary surgery. " Just the usual service at the 
front, nothing of special interest," she says with 
military brevity, baffling your interest, and leav- 
ing you to find out from other sources that she 
was wounded again in June of that year. 

On the nth of October, 1916, a remarkable 
and noteworthy event took place. For once a 
Governmental action was taken with intelli- 
gence. The Government, wishing to institute a 
special course of training for military nurses at 
the front, called to its organization and direc- 
tion, not somebody's relation-in-law, not a poli- 
tician's protegee, but the woman in France best 
fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on 
the part of any Government is worthy of note! 

The hospital which had been built for charita- 



84 THE DAY OF GLORY 

ble purposes on the Rue Desnouettes was loaned 
to the Government. What was needed for its 
head was some one who knew all about what 
training was essential for nursing service at the 
front. Any good military doctor could have 
done this part. Also some one was needed who 
knew all about what is the life of a woman at 
the front. Any good nurse of military experi- 
ence could have seen to this. Also there was 
needed a person with experience in organization, 
with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in 
smooth and regular running. Any good business 
man could have managed this. Furthermore 
there was needed a person with magnetism who 
could inspire the women passing through the 
school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with devo- 
tion — I needn't go on, I think. You must have 
seen that only one person combined all these 
qualifications, and she is the one now at the head 
of the hospital-school. 

Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summon- 
ing her back to that " work at the rear n which 
is such a trial for those who have known the 
glory of direct service at the front. 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 85 
This meant drudgery for her, long hours of 
attention to uninteresting but important details, 
work with a very mixed class of intelligences — • 
the women in her courses of study vary from 
peasant girls to officers' widows; bending her 
quick intelligence to cope with sloth and dull- 
ness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, 
living again in the midst of petty bickerings, 
little personal jealousies, mean ambitions. Noth- 
ing is more startling for those who " come back 
from the front " than to find the world at the 
rear still going on with its tiny quarrels and 
disputes, still industriously raking in its muck- 
heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our 
average, ordinary life than the intense moral 
depression which attends the return to it of those 
who have for a time escaped from it to a 
rougher, more dangerous, and more self-forget- 
ful atmosphere. 

For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin's use- 
fulness is more dramatic than the undramatic 
phase of it in which she is now faithfully toil- 
ing. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness 
under overwhelming responsibilities, her aston- 



86 THE DAY OF GLORY 

ishing physical endurance do not thrill me more 
than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up 
civilian life again and quiet, civilian duties. 

She has organized the hospital ingeniously 
along original lines, as a perfect reproduction 
of what the nurses will encounter at the front: 
a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with 
the nurse's little sleeping-cubicle at the end with 
its rough but sufficient sanitary arrangements. 
Another unit is given over to the operating- 
room and its appendages, the sterilizing-room, 
anesthetic-room, etc. Another is the administra- 
tive building, and contains the offices of the 
medecin-en-chcf, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, 
the bacteriological laboratory. At one side are 
very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters and 
study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who 
pass through the school every three months. For 
Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in hand 
when they have already completed a course of 
training in ordinary hospitals. Even then she 
weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the short, 
intensive, concentrated course, those who do not 
show the necessary physical, mental, and moral 



FRANCE'S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR 87 
qualities to fit them for the grave responsibili- 
ties they will have at the front, for nurses from 
this hospital go out to direct and run the field 
hospitals, not merely to be nurses there. 

The work for the doctor at the head is a 
" grind," nothing less, monotonous, like all teach- 
ing—an ever-reiterated repetition of the same 
thing — no glory, no change, no bright face of 
danger. The clear brown eyes face it as coolly, 
as undaunted, as they faced bursting shells, or 
maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain 
sees its vital importance to the country as well 
as it saw the more picturesque need for stay- 
ing with sick men under fire. The well-tempered 
will keeps lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps 
the whole highly strung, highly developed or- 
ganism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work 
for France. 

There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is 
a citizen to envy, to imitate! 



LOURDES 

From the Ends of the Earth they come — Old 
and Young, the Lame and the Blind — to Ask for 
the Blessing. 

Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left 
in the long line of waiting sick, so that at the 
last, when a little, white-faced blind boy with 
dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed 
over the heads of the crowd, he seemed to have 
come too late. 

His mother's voice rose anxiously, in reiter- 
ated piteous demands to the stretcher-carriers to 
make a place for him, any place, where he could 
receive the blessing, for it was the day of the 
greatest pilgrimage of the year, when twenty-five 
thousand people sang and prayed together for 
the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried 
in solemn procession to bless them, lying in long 
lines up and down the broad esplanade. 

89 



90 THE DAY OF GLORY 

" Oh, for the love of God, find a place for 
him ! " she implored, in so strained a voice of 
entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave 
way a little and allowed her to press forward, 
back of the wheeled chairs of the cripples. The 
stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his 
arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant 
spot. He glanced at a wounded soldier, rigid 
on his litter, his face as white as it would be in 
his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken 
with a disease of the bones which paralyzed his 
legs and made of his hands only twisted, shape- 
less stumps, but which still permitted him to sit 
in one of the wheeled chairs. His little withered 
body did not half fill it, and it was there beside 
him that the attendant decided to put down the 
blind boy. 

His mother gave a long sigh of intense feel- 
ing and between the closely packed bodies of 
the crowd strained forward to be near him. 

" I'm here, darling, I'm here," she said in a 
voice of concentrated tenderness. 

The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, 
toward the sound of her voice and stretched 



LOURDES 91 

back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to 
touch it for an instant, but then said, " Not now, 
darling. You mustn't turn back toward Mother. 
You must join your hands and pray to be cured, 
pray for the blessing. You must repeat what- 
ever the priest says." 

For at that moment the powerfully built, 
bearded priest, with the eyes of fire and the 
thrown-back head of born command, strode 
down the center of the great open place and 
stood looking intently about him at the lines of 
the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs 
of pilgrims back of them. He raised his hands 
suddenly in a vivid gesture, and cried in a 
trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading for- 
ward a charge, " Brothers, pray ! Pray for our 
sick. With all your soul, with all the strength 
of your body and mind, pray God for our 
sick!" 

He paused a moment. Every eye was on him. 

The blind boy held his face lowered meekly 
as blind children often do, as sensitive children 
who know themselves unsightly always do. His 
thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim 



92 THE DAY OF GLORY 

awaiting the blow, but he put his little pale 
fingers together and, turning for a moment, tried 
to show to his mother that they were in the atti- 
tude of prayer. She whispered, " Yes, yes, 
darling, that is right. But not toward me. 
Toward where the blessing is coming, so that 
you may be cured." 

" Lord save us ! Lord God save us, for we 
perish ! " prayed the priest in a loud clear voice 
of exaltation; and after him all the multitude 
cried it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice 
of a forest, or of the sea. 

The blind boy's lips moved with the rest, but 
his little face was clouded and anxious. He 
whispered to the crippled child beside him : 

" Are you blind, too, or can you see ? " 

" I can see," said the other, " but I have never 
walked." 

" Then you must show me where I must put 
my hands so that they will be toward the bless- 
ing," begged the blind child. 

The other took the thin, transparent fingers 
between his twisted stumps, and directed them 
toward the priest, thrillingly upright, aspiring 



LOURDES 93 

visibly toward the sky. " There, you must keep 
them turned toward the priest now/' he said with 
an accent of certainty. " Later on it will be 
toward the procession as it moves along, and 
then at the last toward the church." 

" You must tell me when to change them," 
said the blind boy. 

He stretched out his joined hands farther in 
the direction indicated by his companion and 
repeated with the others, after the priest, his 
little voice lost in the great upward rush of 
the supplications of the thousands around 
him, " Lord ! Lord ! Our sole trust is in 
Thee!" 

The priest's voice soared into a glorious note 
ef song, in which the multitude joined, their 
eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation. 
The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a 
response; the man's voice ran out again, yearn- 
ing, beseeching, the voice of the multitude rose 
thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to 
shake in unison, the low-hanging, heavy gray 
clouds to send back the sound. The chanting, 
imploring, impassioned voice of the throng 



94 THE DAY OF GLORY 

seemed more alive than its multitudinous bodies, 

rapt into utter stillness. 

"Is it thus that I should hold my hands ?" 
whispered the blind boy after a time. 

" No, now the procession has just come into 
the other end of the square," said the crippled 
child. With an effort he leaned, took the little 
white fingers again, and pointed them another 
way. 

" So? " asked the blind child humbly. 

" Yes, so/' answered the other. He tried to 
put his own shapeless stumps together in the atti- 
tude of prayer and began to sing with the pil- 
grims now defiling before them in endless lines, 
" Praise ! All praise to Thee ! Praise, all praise 
to Thee, Lord God!" The pilgrims were pass- 
ing by, now, in single file, each with his long 
white taper, burning yellow in the gray light of 
the gray day. Their voices were loud and per- 
sonal, each one as he passed being heard for an 
instant alone. " Glory ! Glory to Thee ! " they 
all sang the propitiatory words together, over 
and over, a hundred times repeated — the old 
wrinkled peasants in their blouses; the elegant 



LOURDES 95 

officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout 
elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the 
white-faced, shaven priests; the black men from 
Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall, fair- 
haired man from England; the occasional sol- 
dier on leave in his shapeless, faded, blue-gray 
uniform. Above all their voices rose the silver 
bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring 
in its ardor, " Brothers ! Brothers ! with all your 
souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh, 
Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust 
is in Thee. Praised be Thy name ! " 

With each clamorous exhortation, repeated 
clamorously by all those imploring voices, he 
lifted the multitude up another step toward the 
great moment of awe and faith. The tears 
were streaming down the faces of many of the 
women in the crowd. The little boy's mother 
sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might. 

The march past of the innumerable men, the 
incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow 
lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, 
anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed 
that every one, everywhere in the world, was 



96 THE DAY OF GLORY 

marching together, singing and praying, hoping 
against hope for a miracle. 

"Isn't it time to change my hands?" asked 
the little blind boy desperately. " I have 
heard so many people pass. I am very, very 
tired." 

" No, it is not yet time to change," said 
the other, leaning forward to look down the 
esplanade. " The procession with the Host goes 
very slowly because it stops before each sick per- 
son. They are not near yet." 

" My hands are very tired," murmured the 
little blind boy, faintly. But he held his hands 
out still, praying with the others, as the priest 
directed them. " Lord help us, for we perish. 
Lord! Thou alone canst save us! Lord, say but 
one word and we are healed. Lord, say but 
one word. But one word, oh, Lord! 

He held his strengthless hands out as he was 
told, groping helplessly for the blessing he so 
sorely needed; his blind eyes turned docilely in 
the direction indicated to him; he repeated 
meekly in his feeble little voice whatever words' 
he was told to say — and all around him thou- 



LOURDES 97 

sands and thousands of other helpless, docile, 
suffering human beings in similar plight, did the 
same, desperately, their faces groping up toward 
the sky, their joined hands imploring, " Lord 
save us, or we perish ! " 

The pilgrims filed past continually, their eyes 
staringly fixed on the feeble light of their tapers, 
their voices torn out of their bodies by the ever- 
deepening fervor and hope of the shouted, 
passionate commands of the priest, calling, 
" Brothers ! With all your soul pray for our 
sick! Lord, say but one word and they are 
healed ! But one word, oh, Lord ! " 

" The blessing is very long in coming," fal- 
tered the blind boy timidly, his face even whiter 
than at the beginning, his lips blue. 

The pilgrims passed constantly, the heavy 
tramp of their feet shaking the chair on which 
sat the little paralyzed boy and the blind child, 
their hands outstretched. The men's voices were 
hoarse and deep now, trembling with fatigue 
and emotion. 

The perspiration streamed down the face of 
the priest as in piercing tones he exhorted the 



98 THE DAY OF GLORY 

multitudes, " Brothers, with all your soul, pray ! 
Tray!" 

Presently, because he was a weak, sick little 
child, and because the blessing was so long in 
coming, the little blind boy fell asleep, his head 
on the shoulder of the paralyzed child. 

Then all the care and anxiety and humiliation 
and sorrow left his little white face. It was per- 
fect in a perfect peace. 

The blessing had come. 

Evening. 

Scattered all over the vast stretch of the 
esplanade, thousands of little lights flickered and 
moved about in the rainy darkness, all that could 
be seen of the immense multitude gathering for 
the evening procession. The top of the great, 
horseshoe-shaped, marble, inclined plane up 
which they were later to defile, was so high 
above the ground that not a sound reached there 
of all those human voices talking together in the 
dark, calling to each other, as people tried to find 
their friends in the obscurity, and to form 
groups that they might march together. The 



LOURDES 99 

little lights they held were only slightly sheltered 
from the gusts of wind-driven rain by cheap 
paper shades and they flickered and flared up, 
and many were extinguished. Although many 
went out and were lighted again only once more 
to have the wind puff them into blackness, the 
number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the 
crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life 
spread further and further, till around the foot 
of the huge inclined plane was an ocean of lights, 
heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless mo- 
tion like the sea, humanity lost in the darkness. 

Then a faint murmur came up through the 
rain and darkness. Speaking voices are not 
heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. 
The crowd was beginning to sing. 

It was also beginning to take shape. From 
the foot of the inclined plane out into the black 
esplanade, streamed two long files of light, pur- 
poseful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of 
the arrow. The procession was beginning to 
form. 

The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, 
hearing the first notes, took it up, singing as they 



ioo THE DAY OF GLORY 

fell into line. The first of the lights advanced 
up the ascent toward the top, which was blazing 
with light from the illuminated front of the lofty- 
church. Far, far behind, stretching twice 
around the immense esplanade and disappearing 
into the distant blackness of the endless avenue, 
the flickering lights were now in two lines, mov- 
ing forward steadily. 

The sound of voices grew louder, the advanc- 
ing files were visible now, masses intensely black 
against the night. 

The wind roared, the rain beat down. The 
voices suddenly rang out clear and vibrant, high 
above the confused roar of the singing multi- 
tudes below. 

Then the glimmering blur of the faces in the 
reflected light of the candles shone through the 
rain; each dim figure, in a momentary trans- 
figuration, was resplendent in the flare of light 
from the church, the voices shouted loud and 
strong, drowning out in their instant's glory of 
individual life the hoarse chant of the vast crowd 
below. Then each figure passed forward out of 
the light and began to descend the inclined plane 



LOURDES 101 

on the other side, going singing down into the 
blackness. 

There were so many singing now that, al- 
though they all sang the same chant over and 
over, a chant in which recurs constantly the 
acclaiming shout of " Hail ! Hail ! " they were 
not singing in tune together nor even in time, 
nor even often the same words at the same time. 

As the groups passed, each one was singing in 
its own fashion on a different key from those 
gone before and those following them. When 
this was too apparent, they sometimes stopped, 
listened, caught the note from the pilgrims near- 
est to them, and burst out again, this time in 
harmony. But for the most part they listened 
only to their own voices and to those of their 
friends, and sang lustily in a hearty discordance. 
— and so vast was the throng and so simple 
the joyful air they chanted, that from that 
monstrous discordance rose a strange and won- 
derful harmony like no other music in the world, 
with a deep pulsation longer than that of any 
other music, beating time, beating true. 

They passed, shouting out loudly the confident 



102 THE DAY OF GLORY 

words of their song; the young faces often 
laughing gaily in the shaking light of their 
candles, stopping to light the blown-out flames at 
the candles of their friends; the older people 
tramping forward resolutely, singing, often not 
noting that their one light had been blown out 
and that they were walking in darkness — no, not 
walking in darkness, because of the infinite num- 
ber of lights about them, carried by their fel- 
lows; the young girls' eyes glistening through 
the rain as they gazed upward toward the circle 
of white light at the top of the ascent; the old 
men's eyes turned downward on the darkness to 
which they would descend; the occasional priest- 
leader beating time, marshaling the lines; the 
occasional children holding to their parents' 
hands, their eyes blank and trustful, fixed on 
their candles, their pure lips incessantly shaping 
the joyful acclaiming shout of " Hail ! Hail ! " 

Sometimes a group lagged behind, either be- 
cause of the carelessness of the young people 
in it, or the fatigue of the old people, and there 
was almost a break in the line of lights. But 
always as they approached the moment of trans- 



LOURDES 103 

figuration, the ones who were behind hurried 
forward shufflingly to keep the line intact. The 
line was always intact. 

The rain beat down on them, but they sang 
loudly and joyously, rejoicing in singing to- 
gether; the wind tore at their garments and 
puffed at their frail, unprotected lights. Many 
went out. But there were always enough lights 
left in each group to light those of the others — 
if they wished. 

Last of all I saw a strong young man whose 
light had been extinguished, holding out his life- 
less candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman 
who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, 
living flame. 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 

{Near Chateau-Thierry, July, ip 18) 

They were detraining in dense brown crowds at 
what had been the station before German guns 
had knocked it into a shapeless heap of tumbled 
bricks; they were pouring in on foot along the 
road from the west; and when I made my way 
along the main street to the river, I found an- 
other khaki-clad line leaving the little town, 
marching heavily, unrhythmically and strongly 
out across the narrow, temporary wooden 
bridge, laid hastily across the massive stone 
pillars which were all that remained of the 
old bridge. 

An old, white-capped woman, who had been 
one of my neighbors in the days before the lit- 
tle town had known German guns or American 
soldiers, called out to me : " Oh, Madame ! See 
them! Isn't it wonderful! Just look at them! 

105 



106 THE DAY OF GLORY 

All day like that, all night like that. Are there 
any people left in America? And are all your 
people so big, so fine ? " 

"Where are they going?" I asked her, tak- 
ing refuge for a moment in her doorway. 

" To the front directly, the poor boys. They'll 
be fighting in two hours — do you hear the big 
guns off there banging away ? And they so good, 
like nice big boys ! Their poor mothers ! " 

I addressed myself in English to a soldier loi- 
tering near, watching the troops pass, " So they 
are going to the front, these boys?" After a 
stare of intense surprise, a broad smile broke over 
his face. He came closer. " No, ma'am," he 
said, looking at me hard. " No, these are the 
Alabama boys just coming back from the front. 
They've been fighting steady for five days." He 
added : " My, it seems good to talk to an Ameri- 
can woman. I haven't seen one for four 
months ! " 

"Where are you from?" I asked him. 

" Just from the Champagne front, with the 
Third Division. Two of our regiments out 
there were — " He began pouring out exact, de- 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 107 
tailed military information which I would not 
have dreamed of asking him. The simple-hearted 
open confidence of the American soldier was 
startling and alarming to one who had for long 
breathed the thick air of universal suspicion. I 
stopped his fluent statement of which was his 
regiment, where they had been, what their losses 
had been, where they were going. " No, no, I 
mean where are you from in the States?" I 
raised my voice to make myself heard above the 
sudden thunder of a convoy of munition-camions 
passing by and filling the narrow street from side 
to side. 

" Oh, from Kansas City, Missouri. It's just 
eight months and seven days since I last saw the 
old town." (Thus does a mother count the very 
days of the little new life of her child.) 

" And how do you like France ? " 

" Oh, it's all right, I guess. The climate's not 
so bad. And the towns would be well enough if 
they'd clean up their manure-piles better." 

" And the people, how do you get on with 
them?" 

The camions had passed and the street was 



108 THE DAY OF GLORY 

again filled with American infantry, trudging for- 
ward with an air of resolute endurance. 

" Well enough, they don't cheat you. I forgot 
and left a fifty-franc bill lying on the table of a 
house where I'd bought some eggs, and the next 
morning the woman sent her little girl over to 
camp to give it back. Real poor-appearing folk 
they were, too. But I've had enough. I want 
to get home. Uncle Sam's good enough for me. 
I want to hurry up and win the war and beat it 
back to God's country." 

He fell away before the sudden assault on me 
of an old, old man and his old wife, with the 
dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the 
desperate eyes of refugees : " Madame, Madame, 
help us ! We cannot make them understand, the 
Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le- 
Petit. We want to see what is left of our house 
and garden. We want to start in to repair the 
house — and our potatoes must be dug." 

I had passed that morning through what was 
left of their village. For a moment I saw their 
old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across 
the long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 109 
I answered evasively, " But you know they are 
not allowing civilian population to go back as 
yet. All this region is still shelled. It's far too 
dangerous." 

They gave together an exclamation of impa- 
tience as though over the futilities of children's 
talk. " But, Madame, if we do not care about 
the danger. We never cared! We would not 
have left, ever, if the soldiers had not taken us 
away in camions — our garden and vineyard just 
at the time when they needed attention every 
hour. Well, we will not wait for permission; 
we will go back anyhow. The American sol- 
diers are not bad, are they, Madame? They 
would surely not fire on an old man and his 
wife going back to their homes? If Madame 
would only write on a piece of paper that we 
only want to go back to our home to take care 

of it—." 

Their quavering old voices came to me indis- 
tinctly through the steady thudding advance of 
all those feet, come from so far, on so great, 
so high, so perilous a mission ; come so far, many 
of them, to meet death more than half-way — 



no THE DAY OF GLORY 

the poor, old, cramped people before me, blind 
and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, 
seeing nothing but that the comfort of their own 
lives was in danger. I had a nervous revulsion 
of feeling and broke the news to them more 
abruptly than I would have thought possible a 
moment before. "There is nothing left to Vil- 
lers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back 
to." 

Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so 
small, my poor old people. They took the news 
standing, and after the first clutch at each other's 
wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their 
already ashy faces, they did not flinch. 

" But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are 
they all gone, too ? " 

" No, very little damage done there. Every- 
thing was kept, of course, intact for camouflage, 
and the retreat was so rapid there was not enough 
time for destruction." 

"Then we will still go back, Madame. We 
have brought the things for spraying the vine- 
yards as far as here. Surely we can get them 
to Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS in 

sleep on the ground, anywhere. In another week, 
you see, Madame, it will be too late to spray. 
We have enough for ours and our neighbors, 
too. We can save them if we go now. If Ma- 
dame would only write on a piece of paper in 
their language that — " 

So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book 
lying in the heap of rubbish before the ruins of 
a bombarded house (it was a treatise on Bach's 
chorales by the French organist Widor!) and 
wrote, " These are two brave old people, inhabi- 
tants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go back 
there to work under shell-fire to save what they 
can of their own and their neighbors' crops. 
Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France alive." 

" It probably won't do you a bit of good," I 
said, " but there it is for what it is worth." 

" Oh, once the American soldiers know what 
we want, they will let us pass, we know." They 
went off trustfully, holding my foolish " pass " 
in their hands. 

I turned from them to find another young 
American soldier standing near me. "How do 
you do ? " I said, smiling at him. 



H2 THE DAY OF GLORY 

He gave a great start of amazement at the 
sound of my American accent. " Well, how do 
you like being in France ? " I asked him. 

" Gee ! Are you really an American woman ? " 
he said incredulously, his young face lighting up 
as though he saw a member of his own family. 
(t I haven't talked to one in so long! Why yes, 
I like France fine. It's the loveliest country to 
look at, isn't it ? I didn't know any country could 
be kept up so, like a garden. How do they do 
it without any men left? They must be awfully 
fine people. I wish I could talk to them some." 

" Who are these soldiers going through to- 
day?" I asked. "Are they going out to the 
front line trenches, or coming back? I've been 
told both things." 

He answered with perfect certainty and pre- 
cision : " Neither. They are Second Division 
troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their 
French training-camp, going up to hold the re- 
serve line. They never have been in action yet." 

Our attention was distracted to the inside of 
a fruit-shop across the street, a group of Amer- 
ican soldiers struggling with the sign-language, 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 113 
a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper 
volubly unable to conceive that men with all their 
senses could not understand her native tongue. 
I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers 
in a strong Southern accent said, " Oh golly, 
yes, if you would do the talkin' fo' us. We 
cyan't make out whetheh we've paid heh or not, 
and we wondeh if she'd 'low us to sit heah and 
eat ouh fruit." 

From the Frenchwoman, " Oh, Madame, please 
what is it they want now? I have shown them 
everything in sight. How strange that they can't 
understand the simplest language ! " 

The little misunderstanding was soon cleared 
away. I lingered by the counter. " How do you 
like our American troops, Madame ? " I asked. 
" Very well, very much indeed, if only they could 
talk. They don't do any harm. They are good 
to the children. They are certainly as brave as 
men can be. But there is one thing about them 
I don't understand. They overpay you, often, 
more than you ask — won't take change — and yet 
if you leave things open, as we always do, in 
front of the shop, they just put their hands in 



ii 4 THE DAY OF GLORY 

and steal as they go by. I have lost a great deal 
in that way. If they have so much money, why 
do they steal?" 

I contemplated making, and gave it up as too 
difficult, a short disquisition on the peculiarities 
of the American orchard-robbing tradition with 
its ramifications, and instead sat down at the 
table with the Americans, who gave me the greet- 
ing always repeated, " Great Scott ! it's good to 
talk to an American woman ! " 

A fresh-faced, splendidly built lad, looked up 
from the first bite of his melon, crying: "Yes 
suh, a cantaloupe, a' honest-to-the-Lawd canta- 
loupe! I neveh thought they'd heahd of such a 
thing in France." 

They explained to me, all talking at once, 
pouring out unasked miltary information till my 
hair rose up scandalized, that this was their first 
experience with semi-normal civilian life in France 
because they belonged to the troops from Geor- 
gia, volunteers, that they had been in the front- 
line trenches at exactly such a place for precisely 
so many weeks where such and such things hap- 
pened, and before that at such another place,. 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 115 
where they were so many strong, etc., etc. 

" So we neveh saw real sto's to buy things till 
we struck this town. And when I saw a canta- 
loupe I mighty nigh dropped daid ! I don't reck- 
on I'm likely to run into a watermelon, am I? 
I suahly would have to be ca'ied back to camp 
on a stretcheh if I did ! " He laughed out, a boy's 
cfoudless laughter. " But say, what do you-all 
think? I paid fo'ty-five cents for this slice, yes, 
ma'am, fo'ty-five cents for a slice, and back home 
in Geo'gia you pay a nickel for the biggest one 
in the sto' ! " He buried his face in the yellow 
fruit. 

The house began to shake to the ponderous 
passage of artillery. The boys in khaki turned 
their stag-like heads toward the street, glanced 
at the motley-colored, mule-drawn guns and pro- 
nounced expertly, "The 43rd, Heavy Artillery, 
going out to Nolepieds, the fellows from Illi- 
nois. They've just been up in the Verdun sector 
and are coming down to reinforce the 102nd." 

For the first time the idea crossed my head 
that possibly their mania for pouring out mili- 
tary information to the first comer might not be 



n6 THE DAY OF GLORY 

so fatal to necessary secrecy as it seemed. I 
rather pitied the spy who might attempt to make 
coherent profit out of their candor. " How do 
you like being in France? " I asked the boy who 
was devouring the melon. 

He looked up, his eyes kindling, " Well, I was 
plumb crazy to get heah and now I'm heah I 
like it mo' even than I 'lowed I would." I looked 
at his fresh, unlined boy's cheeks, his clear, bright 
boy's eyes, and felt a great wave of pity. " You 
haven't been in active service yet," I surmised. 

Unconsciously, gayly, he flung my pity back in 
my face, " You bet yo' life I have. We've just 
come from the Champagne front, and the sehvice 
we saw theah was suah active, how about it, 
boys?" 

They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, 
excited voices, longing above everything else for 
a listener, leaning forward over the table toward 
me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, 
talking hurriedly because there was so much to 
say, their tense young voices a staccato clatter of 
words which brought to me in jerks, horribly 
familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, ad- 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 117 
vancing over dead comrades, hideous hand-to- 
hand combats — all chanted in those eager young 
voices. 

I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head 
which presages a wave of mortal war-sickness. 

In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, 
" And you like it? You are not ever homesick? " 

The boy with the melon spoke for them all. 
He stretched out his long arms, his hands clenched 
to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw, 
his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young 
face was all aflame. "Oh, you just get to love 
it ! " he cried, shaking with the intensity of his 
feeling. " You just love it! Why, I neveh want 
to go home! I want to stay over heah and go 
right on killin' Boches all my life ! " 

At this I felt sicker, stricken with the col- 
lective remorse over the war which belongs to 
the older generation. I said good-by to them 
and left them to their child-like ecstasy over their 
peaches and melons. 

The artillery had passed. The street was again 
solidly filled with dusty, heavily laden young 
men in khaki, tramping silently and resolutely 



n8 THE DAY OF GLORY 

forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like 
antique Greek shepherd hats, giving to their 
rounded young faces a curious air of classic 
rusticity. 

An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face 
stood near me. "How do you do?" I asked. 
" Can you tell me which troops these are and 
where they are going? " I wondered what con- 
fident and uninformed answer I would receive 
this time. 

Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, 
" I don't know who they be. You don't never 
know anything but your own regiment. The 
kids always think they do. They'll tell you this 
and they'll tell you that, but the truth is we don't 
know no more than Ann — not even where we are 
ourselves, nor where we're going, most of the 
time." 

His accent made me say: "I wonder if you 
are not from my part of the country. I live 
in Vermont, when I'm at home." 

" I'm from Maine," he said soberly, " a farmer, 
over draft age of course. But it looked to me 
like a kind o' mean trick to make the boys do it 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 119 
all for us, so I come along, too." He added,* 
as if in partial explanation, " One of my uncles 
was with John Brown at Harper's Ferry." 

"How do you like it, now you're here?" I 
asked. 

He looked at me heavily. " Like it ? It's 
hell!" he said. 

" Have you been in active service ? " I used 
my usual cowardly evasive phrase. 

"Yes, ma'am, I've killed some of 'em," he 
answered me with brutal, courageous directness. 
He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big, 
calloused farmer's hands, crooked by holding the 
plough-handles. As plainly as he saw it there, 
I saw the blood on them, too. His stern, dark, 
middle-aged face glowered, down solemnly on- 
those strong farmer's hands. " It's dirty work, 
but it's got to be done," he said, gravely, " and 
I ain't a-going to dodge my share of it." 

A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young sol- 
dier came loitering by now, and stopped near 
us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but 
evidently in order to share in the phenomenon 
of a talk in English with an American woman. 



iao THE DAY OF GLORY 

I took him into the conversation with the usual 
query, " How do you do, and how do you like 
being in France ? " 

He answered with a strong Italian accent, and 
I dived into a dusty mental corner to bring out 
my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we were 
talking like old friends. He had been born in 
Italy, yes, but brought up in Waterbury, Connec- 
ticut. His grandfather had been one of Gari- 
baldi's Thousand, so of course he had joined the 
American army and come to France among the 
first. 

"Well, there are more than a Thousand of 
you this time," I said, looking at the endless 
procession defiling before us. 

" Si, signora, but it is a part of the same war. 
We are here to go on with what the Thousand 
began." 

Yes, that was true, John Brown's soul and 
Garibaldi's, and those of how many other fierce 
old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on 
there before my eyes, carried like invisible ban- 
ners by all those strong young arms. 

An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 121 
black came down the street toward us, an ex- 
pression of care on her face. When she saw me 
she said, " Well, I've found you. They said 
you were in town today. Won't you come back 
to the house with me ? Something important. I'm 
terribly troubled with some American officers — 
oh, the war ! " 

I went, apprehensive of trouble, and found her 
house (save for a total absence of window-glass) 
in its customary speckless and shining order. She 
took me upstairs to what had been a bedroom 
and was now an office in the Quartermaster's 
department. It was filled with packing-case im- 
provised desks and with serious-faced, youngish 
American officers who, in their astonishment at 
seeing me, forgot to take their long black cigars 
out of their mouths. 

" There ! " said the woman-with-a-grievance, 
pointing to the floor. " Just look at that. Just 
look! I tell them and I tell them, not to put their 
horrid boxes on the floor but to keep them on 
the linoleum, but they are so stupid, they can't 
understand language that any child could take 
in! And they drag those boxes just full of nails 



122 THE DAY OF GLORY 

all over the floor. I'm sick of them and their 
scratches ! " 

A big gun boomed solemnly off on the hori- 
zon as accompaniment to this speech. 

I explained in a neutral tone to the officers 
looking expectantly at me, what was at issue. 
I made no comment. None was needed evidently, 
for they said with a gravity which I found lova- 
ble that they would endeavor to be more careful 
about the floor, that indeed they had not under- 
stood what their landlady had been trying to tell 
them. I gave her their assurance and she went 
away satisfied. 

As the door closed on her, they broke into 
broad grins and pungent exclamations. " Well, 
how about that ! Wouldn't that get you ? With 
the town bombarded every night, to think the old 
lady was working herself up to a froth about her 
floor- varnish ! And we thinking that every 
French person is breaking his heart over the 
invaded regions ! " 

One of them said, " I never thought of it be- 
fore, but I bet you my Aunt Selina would do 
just that! I just bet if her town was bombarded 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 123 
she'd go right on shooing the flies out of her 
kitchen and mopping up her pantry floor with 
skim-milk. Why, the French are just like any- 
body, aren't they ? Just like our own folks ! " 

" They are," I assured him, " so exactly like 
our own folks, like everybody's own folks that 
it's quite impossible to tell the difference." 

When I went away, the owner of the house 
was sweeping the garden-path clear of broken- 
glass. " This bombardment is such a nuisance ! " 
she said disapprovingly. " I'd like to know what 
the place would be like if I didn't stay to look 
after it." 

I looked at her enviously, securely shut away 
as she was by the rigid littleness of her outlook 
from any blighting comprehension of what was 
going on about her. But then, I reflected, there 
are instants when the comprehension of what is 
going on is not blighting. No, on the whole I 
did not envy her. 

Outside the gate I fell in at once with a group 
of American soldiers. It was impossible to take 
a step in any direction in the town without doing 
this. After the invariable expressions of surprise 



i2 4 THE DAY OF GLORY 

and pleasure over seeing an American woman, 
came the invariable burst of eager narration of 
where they had been and what had been hap- 
pening to them. They seemed to me touchingly 
like children, who have had an absorbing, exciting 
adventure and must tumble it all out to the first 
person they meet. Their haste, their speaking all 
at once, gave me only an incoherent idea of what 
they wished to say. I caught odd phrases, dis- 
connected sentences, glimpses through pin-holes. 

" One of the fellows, a conscript, that came 
to fill a vacant place in our lines, he was only 
over in France two weeks, and it was his first 
time in a trench. He landed there at six o'clock 
in the evening, and just like I'm telling you, at 
a quarter past six a shell up and exploded and 
buried him right where he stood. Yes, ma'am, 
you certainly do see some very peculiar things 
in this war." 

From another, " We took the whole lot of 'em 
prisoners, and passed 'em back to the rear, but 
out of the fifteen we took, eight died of sud- 
den heart-disease before they got back to the 
prisoners' camp." (I tried not to believe this, 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 125 

but the fact that it was told with a laugh and 
received with a laugh reminded me gruesomely 
that we are the nation that permits lynching of 
helpless men by the mob.) 

From another, " Some of the fellows say they 
think about the Lusitania when they go after the 
Boche. I don't have to come down as far as 
that. Belgium's plenty good enough a whet- 
stone for my bayonet." (This reminded me with 
a thrill that we are the nation that has always 
ultimately risen in defense of the defenseless.) 

From another, " One of our own darkies went 
up to one of these here Senegalese and began 
talking United States to him. Of course the 
other darkey talked back in French, and ours 
said, ' Why, you pore thing ! You be'n over 
heah so long you dun forgot yo' motheh- 
tongue ! ' " 

From another, " Oh, I can't stand the French ! 
They make me tired ! And their jabber ! I seen 
some of 'em talk it so fast they couldn't even 
understand each other! Honest, I did." 

From another, "There's something that sort 
of takes me about the life over here. I'm not 



126 THE DAY OF GLORY 

going to be in any hurry to go back to the States 
and hustle my head off, after the war's over." 

From another, " Not for mine. Me for Chi- 
cago the day after the Bodies are licked." 

They were swept away by a counter-current 
somewhere in the khaki ebb and flow about us, 
and I found myself with a start next to a poilu, 
yes a real poilu with a faded horizon-blue uni- 
form and a domed, battered, blue French casque, 
such a poilu as had filled the town when I had 
lived there. 

" Well/' I said to him, " things have changed 
here. The town's khaki now." He looked at 
me out of bright brown eyes, smiled, and entered 
into conversation. We talked, of course, of the 
American soldier, one of whom came up and 
stood at my elbow. When I stopped to speak 
to him, " Gee ! " he said, " I wish I could rip 
it off like that. I can say ' combien ' and ' trop 
cher,' but there I stick. Say, what does the 
Frenchman say about us? Now, since that little 
Belleau-wood business I guess they see we know 
a thing or two ourselves about how to run a 
war! They're all right, of course; mighty fine 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 127 
soldiers, but Lord! you'd know by the way any 
one of them does business, as if he's all day for 
it, that they couldn't run a war fast, the way it 
ought to be run, the way we're going to run it, 
now we're here." 

I did not think it necessary to translate all of 
this to the bright-eyed little Frenchman on my 
other side, who began to talk as the American 
stopped. " You asked my opinion of the Ameri- 
can troops, Madame. I will give it to you frankly. 
The first who came over, your regular army, the 
mercenaries, made a very bad impression indeed. 
All who have come since have made the best 
possible impression. They are really astonishingly 
courageous, and there could be no better, or more 
cordial comrades in the world. But oh ! Madame, 
as far as they really know how to make modern 
war, they are children, just children ! They make 
the mistakes we made four years ago. They have 
so much to learn of the technique of war, and 
they will lose so many men in learning it ! It is 
sad to think of!" 

I did not think it necessary to translate all this 
to the American who now shook hands with both 



128 THE DAY OF GLORY 

of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too, 
after a look at the clock in the church-tower, 
made his compliments, saluted, and disappeared. 

I walked forward and, coming to the church 
door, stepped inside. It was as though I had 
stepped into another world. I had found the only 
place in town where there were no soldiers. The 
great, gray, dim, vaulted interior was empty. 

After the beat of the marching feet outside, 
after the shuffling to and fro of the innumera- 
ble men quartered in town, after the noisy shops 
crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant 
thunderous passage of the artillery and munitions- 
camions — the long, hushed quiet of the empty 
church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for 
just an instant if there could be any military reg- 
ulation, forbidding our soldiers to enter the 
church ; and even as I wondered, the door opened 
and a boy in khaki stepped in — one out of all 
those hordes. He crossed himself, took a rosary 
out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers. 

Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that 
day. Whatever else we are, I reflected, we are 
not a people of mystics. 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 129 
But then I remembered the American soldier 
who had said that Belgium was a good enough 
whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the 
rough, gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk 
his share of the world's dirty work. Perhaps 
there are various kinds of mystics. 

Once outside the church I turned to look up 
Madame Larconneur, the valiant market-gardener 
who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young 
war-widow, with two little children, whom I had 
watched toiling early and late, day and night, 
to keep intact the little property left her by her 
dead soldier husband. I had watched her, draw- 
ing from the soil of her big garden, wet quite 
laterally by her sweat, the livelihood for her 
fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bom- 
bardment of the town had done to her and her 
small, priceless home. 

I found the street, I found the other houses 
there, but where her little, painfully, well-kept 
house had stood was a heap of stones and rub- 
ble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended 
rows of beans and cabbages and potatoes, were 
shell-holes where the chalky barren subsoil 



i 3 o THE DAY OF GLORY 

streaked the surface, and where the fertile black 
earth, fruit of years of labor, was irrevocably 
buried out of sight. Before all this, in her poor, 
neat black, stood the war-widow with her chil- 
dren. 

I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my 
cheeks. " Oh, Madame Larconneur, how awful! 
How awful!" I cried, putting out both hands 
to her. 

She turned a white, quiet face on me and 
smiled, a smile that made me feel infinitely hum- 
ble. " My little girls are not hurt," she said, 
drawing them to her, " and as for all this — why, 
if it is a part of getting other people's homes 
restored to them — her gesture said that the price 
was not too high. 

The look in her sunken eyes took me for an 
instant up into a very high place of courage and 
steadfastness. For the first time that day, the 
knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud 
to have her put her work-deformed hands in 
mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister's kiss. 

It steadied me somewhat during the difficult 
next hour, when in the falling twilight I walked 



SOME CONFUSED IMPRESSIONS 13T 

up and down between the long rows of raw earth, 
with the innumerable crosses, each with its new, 
bright American flag, fluttering in the sweet coun- 
try air. I needed to recall that selfless courage, 
for my heart was breaking with sorrow, with 
guilt-consciousness, with protest, as I stood there, 
thinking of our own little son, of the mothers 
of the boys who lay there. 

A squad of soldiers were preparing graves 
for the next day. As they dug in the old, old 
soil of the cemetery to make a place for the new 
flesh come from so far to lie there forever, a 
strong odor of corruption and decay came up in 
puffs and drifted away down toward the little 
town lying below us, in its lovely green setting, 
still shaking rhythmically to the ponderous pas- 
sage of the guns, of the troops, of the camions. 

At one side were a few recent German graves, 
marked with black crosses and others, marked 
with stones, dating from the war of 1870, that 
other nightmare when all this smiling country- 
side was blood-soaked — and how many times be- 
fore that ! 

Above me, dominating the cemetery, stood a 



132 THE DAY OF GLORY 

great monument of white marble, holding up to 
all those graves the ironic inscription, " Love ye 
one another." 

The twilight fell more and more deeply, and 
became darkness. The dull, steady surge of the 
advancing troops grew louder. Night had come, 
night no longer used for rest after labor in the 
sunlight, night which must be used to hurry troops 
and more troops forward over roads shelled by 
day. 

They passed by hundreds, by thousands, an 
endless, endless procession — horses, mules, cam- 
ions, artillery, infantry, cavalry; obscure shadowy 
forms no longer in uniform, no longer from 
Illinois, or Georgia or Vermont, no longer even 
American; only human — young men, crowned 
with the splendor of their strength, going out 
gloriously through the darkness to sacrifice. 



" IT IS RATHER FOR US TO BE 
HERE DEDICATED " 

<e It is rather for us to be here dedicated .... n 

Out in the wheat-field, golden under a golden 
sun, I came suddenly on the young American sol- 
dier, lying dead, his face turned toward the Bois 
de Belleau. He was the stillest thing in all the 
silent countryside, ghostly quiet after the four- 
days' din of battle, now gone forward and thun- 
dering on the horizon. Compared to his stillness, 
the wheat-stalks, broken and trampled as they 
were, seemed quivering conscious life; the trees, 
although half-shattered by the shell-fire, flut- 
tered their bright leaves, vividly alive ; the weeds 
by the roadside vibrated in triumph. They were 
wounded, mutilated, disfigured, but they had sur- 
vived. They were alive. Only the soldier had 
not survived. 

All men go a long journey to meet their death, 
through many days and months and years. But 

133 



134 THE DAY OF GLORY 

he and his comrades had gone a longer than any 
man before them. They had passed through all 
those days and months and years; and more 
than that, across unending miles of those other 
wheat-fields in a far country and across the un- 
ending miles of the ocean they saw for the first 
time; but far more than that, they had crossed 
incalculable gulfs of traditions, of prejudice, of 
the tyranny of old, fixed ideas. 

He had come a long journey, he had trod a new 
road, he was fighting a new fight, this soldier 
who had turned his back on the limitations of 
the past, who was making forward into the fu- 
ture with all the strength and faith of his young 
manhood, when he met his sudden destiny and 
lay down forever in a wheat-field of France. 

There he lay in a blessed, blessed stillness, hav- 
ing done his best. 

Being still alive, and so not permitted to lie 
down by him to rest, I left him, and returned to 
a great city, any great city — all great cities every- 
where in the world being the same. 

I stood before the door of a shop. I saw an 
old, thin, work-deformed woman cowering before 



" IT IS FOR US TO BE DEDICATED " 135 
a well-fed man with a brutal voice who stood 
over her, angrily shouting at her that she had 
not sufficiently burnished the brass hinges of the 
great glass doors. With the rich abundance of 
the wheat-fields still golden before my eyes, I 
saw her cowering before him, all her sacred hu- 
man dignity stripped from her by her need for 
food, by the fear of more hunger than even she 
could endure. 

I saw a woman with a bloated, flabby body, 
strained together into a cohesion by steel bands, 
with a bloated, flabby face covered with red and 
white. Small glass-like pieces of white stone were 
thrust into the pierced flesh of her ears, gleamed 
on her protuberant bosom, on her puffed, useless 
fingers. With the roar of the distant battle still 
in my ears, I heard her saying, " The war is last- 
ing too long! Lucette tells me that it's impossi- 
ble for her to get the right shade of silk for my 
corset ; the only coiffeur who understands my hair 
has been sent to the front; and I have not had 
a bonbon in ten days." 

I saw a wretched, disinherited son of man, 
shaking with alcoholism, rotten with disease, livid 



136 THE DAY OF GLORY 

with hunger, undone with hopelessness, flung on 
a bench like a ragged sack of old bones. Only 
the palsied trembling of his dirty hands showed 
that he lived. But with the awful odor of real 
death still in my nostrils, I perceived that he was 
alive, while the strong young soldier was dead. 

I saw a man with a gross, pale countenance, 
with white fine linen and smooth black broad- 
cloth, who stepped confidently forward, not deign- 
ing to lift his eyes to the crowd about him, sure 
that they would give way before the costliness 
of his ring and pin. 

In his soft, white hands he held a newly printed 
newspaper which, open at the news from the 
stock exchange, he read with an expression of 
eager rapacity. On his way stood a woman in 
all the fleshly radiance of her youth, with some 
of the holiness of youth still left on her painted 
mouth. She, looking at him hungrily, desper- 
ately, forced his eyes up to meet hers. With the 
glory of the dead soldier still in my soul, I saw 
the rapacity in his eyes change to lust, I saw 
an instant's sickness in hers go out, quenched 
by the bravado of despair. 



" IT IS FOR US TO BE DEDICATED " 137 

Oh, American soldier, lying still in the wheat- 
field of France, did you come so far a journey 
to meet your death in order that all this might 
continue ? 

"Let us here highly resolve that all these dead 
shall not have died in vain "- 



THE DAY OF GLORY 

. . . if the armistice is signed, a salvo of 
camion from the Invalides at eleven o'clock will 
announce the end of the war. 

The clock hands crept slowly past ten and 
lagged intolerably thereafter. The rapid beating 
of your heart, telling off the minutes, brought 
eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your 
heart, all the world, seemed to stand still. The 
great moment was there. Would the announc- 
ing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as 
the world kept during that supreme moment of 
suspense! It was the quintessence of all the 
moral torture of four nightmare years. 

And then . . . like a shock within your own 
body it came, the first solemn proclamation of 
the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the 
very sky, with its news. The war was over. 
The accursed guns had ceased tearing to pieces 
our husbands and our sons and our fathers. 

139 



140 THE DAY OF GLORY 

Of all the hundreds of thousands of women 
who heard those guns, I think there was not one 
who did not feel instantly, scalding on her 
cheeks, the blessed tears — tears of joy! She had 
forgotten that there could be tears of joy. The 
horrible weight on the soul that had grown to 
be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging 
flood; the horrible constriction around the heart 
loosened. We wept with all our might; we 
poured out once for all the old bitterness, the 
old horror. We felt sanity coming back, and 
faith and even hope, that forgotten possession of 
the old days. 

When the first tears of deliverance had passed, 
and your knees had stopped shaking, and your 
heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, 
why, then every one felt one common imperious 
desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his 
own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of 
his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving 
with that of all his fellows, to make himself 
physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with 
rejoicing humanity. 

And we all rushed out into the streets. 



THE DAY OF GLORY 141 

I think there never can have been such a day 
before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy 
for every one. For the emotion was so intense 
that, during the priceless hours of that first day, 
it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold 
no more than that great gladness. The dreadful 
past, the terrible problems of the future, were 
not. We lived and drew our breath only in the 
knowledge that "firing had ceased at elev* 1 
o'clock that morning," and that thc£° mo had 
fought as best they could for the Right had con- 
quered. You saw everywhere supreme testimony 
to the nobility of the moment, women in black, 
with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on 
their long black veils, with at last a smile, the 
most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed 
eyes. They were marching with the others in 
the streets; every one was marching with every 
one else, arm in arm, singing: 

Allons, en f ants de la patrie, 
Le Jour de Gloire est arrive! 

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and 
repeated by every band of jubilant men and 



142 THE DAY OF GLORY 

women and children who swept by, waving flags 
and shouting: 

Come, children of our country, 
The Day of Glory is here! 



Every group had at its head a permissionnaire 
or two in field uniform who had been pounced 
upon as the visible emblem of victorv, kissed, 
embrace \ ™ V ered with flowers, and set in the 
front rank to carry the largest flag. Sometimes 
there walked beside these soldiers working 
women with sleeping babies in their arms, some- 
times old men in frock coats with ribbons in 
their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laugh- 
ing little munition workers still in their black 
aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in 
their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, 
sometimes women in long mourning veils, some- 
times ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled 
with crippled soldiers waving their crutches — 
but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing 
jubilee. During those few blessed hours there 
was no bitterness, no evil arrogance, no revenge- 



THE DAY OF GLORY 143 

ful fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon 
those thousands and thousands of human faces 
all shining with the same exaltation can never 
entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing 
them to be capable of that pure joy. 

The Day of Glory has come. 

The crowd seemed to be merely washing back 
and forth in surging waves of thanksgiving, up 
and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers 
to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. 
But once you were in it, singing and marching 
with the others, you felt an invisible current 
bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction ; 
and soon, as you marched, and grew nearer the 
unknown goal, you heard another shorter, more 
peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer 
shout, repeated over and over : 

Allons, enfants de la patrie, 
Le Jour de Gloire est arrive! 

Now people were beginning to shout : " To 
Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! 
To Strasbourg ! " Then you knew that you 



144 THE DAY OF GLORY 

were being swept along to the Place de la Con- 
corde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg, freed 
from her forty years of mourning and slavery. 
The crowd grew denser and denser as it ap- 
proached that heart of Paris; and the denser it 
grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoic- 
ing, mounting up almost visibly to the quiet 
gray skies : 

Come, children of our country, 
The Day of Glory is here! 

" To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Stras- 
bourg!" 

No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, 
not one, not one in all those long hours of shout- 
ing out what was in the heart; no ugly effigies, 
no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy 
— instead a fresh outburst of rejoicing at the 
encounter with a long procession of Belgians, 
marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags 
and pealing out like trumpets the noble Braban- 
gonne! We made way for them with respectful 
admiration, we stopped our song to listen to 



THE DAY OF GLORY 145 

theirs, we let them pass, waving our hats, our 
handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing flowers 
upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp 
as they went by, blessing them for their con- 
stancy and courage, sharing their relief till our 
hearts were like to burst! 

We fell in behind them and at once had to 
separate again to allow the passage of a huge 
camion, bristling with American soldiers, heaped 
up in a great pyramid of brown. How every 
one cheered them, a different shout, with none 
of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for 
pain that had greeted the Belgian exiles. These 
brave, lovable, boyish crusaders come from 
across the sea for a great ideal, who had been 
ready to give all, but who had been blessedly 
spared the last sacrifice — it was a rollicking shout 
which greeted them ! They represented the 
youth, the sunshine; they were loved and 
laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd as they 
passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side 
to shake the myriad hands stretched up to them, 
catching at the flowers flung at them, shouting 
out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging 



146 THE DAY OF GLORY 

by the professionally frantic gestures of a cheer 
leader, grinding his teeth and waving his arms 
wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound. 
Whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the 
general uproar, the only coherent accent of 
which was the swelling cry repeated till it was 
like an elemental sound of nature. 

The Day of Glory has arrived. 

Now a group of English soldiers overtook us, 
carrying a great, red, glorious English flag, 
adding some hearty, inaudible marching song to 
the tumult. As they passed, a poilu in our band 
sprang forward, seized one of the Anglo-Saxons 
in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly on both 
cheeks. Then there was laughter, and shouts 
and handshakings and more embracing, and they 
too vanished away in the waves of the great 
river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly 
toward the statue of the lost city whose loss had 
meant the triumph of unscrupulous force, whose 
restitution meant the righting of an old wrong 
in the name of justice. We were almost there 



THE DAY OF GLORY 147 

now; the huge open Place opened out be- 
fore us. 

Now we had come into it, and our songs for 
an instant were cut short by one great cry of 
astonishment. As far as the eye could reach, 
the vast public square was black with the crowd, 
and brilliant with waving flags. A band up on 
the terrace of the Tuileries, stationed between 
the captured German airplanes, flashed in the 
air the yellow sheen of their innumerable brass 
instruments, evidently playing with all their 
souls, but not a sound of their music reached our 
ears, so deafening was the burst of shouting and 
singing as the crowd saw its goal, the high 
statue of the lost city, buried in heaped-up 
flowers and palms, a triumphant wreath of gold 
shadowing the eyes which so long had looked 
back to France from exile. 

Ah, what an ovation we gave her! Then we 
shouted as we had not done before, the great 
primitive, inarticulate cry of rejoicing that 
bursts from the heart too full. We shook out 
our flags high over our heads, as we passed, we 
cast our flowers up on the pedestal, we were 



1 48 THE DAY OF GLORY 

swept along by the current — we were the cur- 
rent ourselves! 

At the base of the statue a group of white- 
haired Alsatians stood, men and women, with 
quivering lips and trembling hands. Theirs 
was the honor to arrange the flowers which, 
tossed too hastily by the eager bearers, fell to 
the ground. 

As they stooped for them, and reached high 
to find yet one more corner not covered with 
blooms, a splendid, fair-haired lad, sturdy and 
tall, with the field outfit of the French soldier 
heavy on his back, pushed his way through the 
crowd. 

He had in his hand a little bouquet — white 
and red roses, and forget-me-nots. His eyes 
were fixed on the statue. He did not see the 
old men and women there to receive the flowers. 
He pressed past them and with his own young 
hands laid his humble offering at the feet of the 
recovered city. He looked up at the statue and 
his lips moved. He could not have been more 
unconscious if he had been entirely alone in an 
Alsatian forest. The expression of his beautiful 



THE DAY OF GLORY 149 

young face was such that a hush of awe fell on 
those who saw him. 

An old woman in black took his hand in hers 
and said : " You are from Alsace ? " 

" I escaped from Strasbourg to join the 
French army," he said, " and all my family are 
there." His eyes brimmed, his chin quivered. 

The old woman had a noble gesture of self- 
forgetting humanity. She took him in her arms 
and kissed him on both cheeks. " You are my 
son," she said. 

They all crowded around him, taking his 
hand. " And my brother ! " " And mine ! " 
"And mine!" 

The tears ran down their cheeks. 



BY DOROTHY CANFIELD 

HOME FIRES IN FRANCE 
True stories of war-time France. $1.50 net. 

"The finest work of fiction produced by the war."— Prof. Wm. Lyon Phelps. 
" Of war books, ' Home Fires in France ' is most likely to endure for its 
truth, its humanity and its literary value."— The Nation. 

UNDERSTOOD BETSY 

Illustrated by Ada C. Williamson. $1.30 net, 

" That rare thing, a good book for girls."— JV. Y. Evening Post. 
Older readers will find its humor delightful. A book that " holds laughter, 
some excitement and all outdoors." 

Two Novels oj American Life 

THE BENT TWIG 

The story of a lovely open-eyed, open-minded Ameri- 
can girl, her family, and her romance. $1.50 net. 

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE 

An unusual personal and real story of American family 
life. #1.50^/. 

Two Volumes of Notable Short Stories 

HILLSBORO PEOPLE 

Stories of Vermont people, with occasional Vermont 
Verse by Sarah N. Cleghorn. $1.50 net. 

THE REAL MOTIVE 

Stories with varied backgrounds unified by the underly- 
ing humanity of all the characters. $1.50 net. 



HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Publishers New Yorit 



BY MARGARET WIDDEMER 

NOVE LS 

THE WISHING-RING MAN 

A romance of a New England summer colony. 
$1.50 net. 

" Margaret Widdemer, who says she likes happy stories, 
proves it by writing them for other people to read. . . . The 
book is full of charm, amusing incident, and gay conversa- 
tion; and the interest in the situation holds to the last half 
page." — N.Y. Evening Post. 



YOU'RE ONLY YOUNG ONCE 

Miss Widdemer's new novel is the story of youth's 
romance as it came to the five girls and three boys 
of a happy American family. $1.50 net. 

POETRY 

FACTORIES, AND OTHER POEMS 

Second printing. $1.30 net. 

" An art which speaks ever so eloquently for itself. . . . 
Splendid effort both in thought and execution, and ranks 
with the cry of the children as voiced by Mrs. Browning." — 
San Francisco Chronicle. 

" Among the foremost of American versifiers when she 
touches the great passionate realities of life." — Living Age. 

THE OLD ROAD TO PARADISE 

A collection of the poems that have appeared since 
u Factories. " $1.25 net. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YOPsK 



BY SIMEON STRUNSKY 

PROFESSOR LATIMER'S PROGRESS 

The " sentimental journey " of a middle-aged 
American scholar upon whose soul the war has come 
down heavily, and who seeks a cure — and an answer 
— in a walking trip up- State. 

" The war has produced no other book like ' Professor 
Latimer's Progress,' with its sanative masculine blend of deep 
feeling, fluid intelligence, and heart-easing mirth, its people 
a joyous company. It is a spiritual adventure, the adventure 
of the American soul in search of a new foothold in a totter- 
ing world. We have so many books of documents, of animus, 
or argument ; what a refreshment to fall in, for once in a 
way, with a book of that quiet creative humor whose 'other 
■The Nation. {Illustrated, $1.40 net.) 



LITTLE JOURNEYS TOWARDS PARIS (J*}J) 

By W. Hohenzollern, translated and adapted for 
unteutored minds by Simeon Strunsky. 75 cents net. 

"If only the Germans could be supplied with translations 
of this exquisite satire they would die laughing at the grisly 
joke on themselves. Not only funny, it is a final reductio 
ad absurdum of the Hun philosophy." — Chicago Tribune. 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Or Village Life in New York City 

Graceful essays about the average citizen in his 
apartment house, in the street, at the theater, the 
baseball park, with his children, etc. $1.35 net. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



The Third Edition, Revised mid Enlarged, of 

THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE 

COMPILED BY 

BURTON E. STEVENSON 

has been revised from end to end — 590 poems have been 
added, pages renumbered, author, title, and first line in- 
dices, and the biographical matter corrected, etc., etc. 

The hundreds of letters from readers and poets suggest- 
ing additions or corrections as well as the columns of 
reviews of the first edition have been considered. Poets 
who were chary of lending their support to an unknown 
venture have now generously permitted the use of their 
work. 

This edition includes the "new" poets such as Mase- 
field, Chesterton, Frost, Rupert Brooke, de la 
Mare, Ralph Hodgson, etc. 

"A collection so complete and distinguished that it is 
difficult to find any other approaching it sufficiently for 
comparison." — New York Times Book Review on the 
first edition. 

India Paper, 4,096 pages 

Cloth, one volume, $10.00 net. 

Cloth, two volumes, $12.50 net. 

Half Morocco, one volume, $14.00 net. 

Half Morocco, two volumes, $25.00 net. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



H 61- 79jyj 



1 •• - ' °o 




.'<^-' 






Vv, G 



£ °^ WW^" a*^*. ~. ;./.- ,' J ^" ^ 




v v 






.#*+ 



J? %» 

Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process). 
*l O Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: jyfl "Jfl 

, . . PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
>V (724)779-2111 






• ^ a u *?wv ■? ** • 



$ v. 







